MAGYAR JETI ZRT v. HUNGARY JUDGMENT 17 journalistic content and thereby to verify the veracity of the publication. Hyperlinking also promoted diversity within the media and facilitated an informed public debate by allowing information and opinions to be more freely expressed and accessed. In the interveners’ submission, the imposition of strict liability for hyperlinking had a chilling effect, since journalists were not in a position themselves to verify the legality of the content on any linked pages and as a consequence would rather refrain from this reporting technique in favour of a more traditional approach. They also pointed out that in practice hyperlinked content could itself be changed so that it ceased to be lawful by the entity which controlled the relevant web page, for which it would be unreasonable to hold the journalist responsible. The imposition of strict liability did not meet a pressing social need because anyone whose rights had been adversely affected by the placing of unlawful content online would be able to seek adequate protection by suing the person who had placed the unlawful content online and requesting that the injurious content be removed. The interveners accepted that there could be situations where a journalist’s or journalistic organisation’s liability arose, for example when they proclaimed specific unlawful content to be true or when they refused to remove a hyperlink to a web page which had been found by a court judgment to contain a substantial amount of illegal content. 52. Access Now, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa and European Digital Rights in their joint observations submitted that the design of the Internet was premised on the idea of free linking of information. They argued that hyperlinks were not in themselves intended to constitute editorial statements and did not necessarily imply, in particular, that one publication endorsed the other. Hyperlinks merely pointed to other pages or web resources, whose content, conversely, could change after the first hyperlink had been posted. In the interveners’ submission, the imposition of an objective-liability standard was unworkable, requiring individual users to assume that any hyperlink they posted pointed to content they could verify. 53. The Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation (collectively “Mozilla”) argued that the sole purpose of hyperlinks was to allow readers to navigate to and from information. Hyperlinks were technical and automatic means for users to access information located elsewhere and could not be considered to amount to publication of that information. A restriction on the use of hyperlinks would undermine the very purpose of the World Wide Web to make items of information accessible by linking them to each other. The intervener expressed doubts as to how people would be able to convey information across the countless number of web pages in existence today if hyperlinking could give rise to liability. Without hyperlinks, publishers would have to provide alternative instructions for readers to find more information. 54. The European Information Society Institute submitted that hyperlinks were a primary tool of digital navigation: they allowed immediate access to other texts, unlike traditional citation. They also had an impact on social interactions, which could easily be repressed by restrictions