03/02/2020 2016 BCSC 686 Pritchard v. Van Nes obtained actual knowledge of the defamatory posting, and that it had been within the Federation's control to remove the posting. [102] In Weaver v. Corcoran, 2015 BCSC 165, Madam Justice Burke dealt squarely with the issue of liability for third-party defamatory comments in the reply section of the on-line edition of the National Post newspaper. The plaintiff was a professor at the University of Victoria and a wellknown scientist in the climate change field. He claimed that four articles published by the newspaper defamed him, and he sued the National Post, its publisher, and the journalists who authored the articles. [103] The plaintiff Weaver also claimed that the defendants were liable for numerous reader postings made in response to each of the defaming articles. The defendants’ position was that they were not the publishers of the reader comments because they had no control over the posts and were not involved in their making. They argued they played a passive instrumental role and took no deliberate action amounting to approval, adoption, promotion or ratification of the contents of the reader posts, citing Home Equity Development Inc. v. Crow, 2004 BCSC 124. Once the defendants had become aware of the defamatory reader postings and received the complaint from the plaintiff scientist, the postings were taken down within one or two days. The defendants argued it was unrealistic for them to screen the voluminous comments submitted by readers. [104] Justice Burke reviewed the case law and concluded that in order to find liability the plaintiff must show an active or deliberate act in making the defamatory information available to others (para. 275). Ultimately, Burke J. held that it would be unreasonable to expect the National Post to pre-vet every comment before it was posted. The National Post and its columnists were said to have a passive instrumental role (para. 284): Until awareness occurs, whether by internal review or specific complaints that are brought to the attention of the National Post or its columnists, the National Post can be considered to be in a passive instrumental role in the dissemination of the reader postings. It has taken no deliberate action amounting to approval or adoption of the contents of the reader posts. Once the offensive comments were brought to the attention of the defendants, however, if immediate action is not taken to deal with these comments, the defendants would be considered publishers as at that date. [105] In passing, Burke J. acknowledged that in the case of a content provider such as the National Post, a more nuanced approach is necessary when reader comments are actively solicited. It is stated that many of the comments in issue attacked the character of the plaintiff in a vitriolic manner (para. 268). There appears to have been no allegation of the defendants’ own defamatory content having instigated or incited the type of defamatory reader comments that were made. [106] In Niemela v. Malamas, 2015 BCSC 1024, the plaintiff sought an interlocutory injunction compelling Google Inc. to block from its global search results 146 universal resource locators (“URLs”) for websites containing defamatory comments about the plaintiff. This was in addition to a claim against Google for defamation. Madam Justice Fenlon had to determine whether the text accompanying the URLs listed in the Google search results, known as “snippets”, made Google a publisher of the defamatory material. She found support for her analysis in Metropolitan International Schools Ltd. v. Designtechnica Corp., [2009] EWHC 1765 (Q.B.), a similar case in https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/16/06/2016BCSC0686.htm 19/26