SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION the allegations (for more jurisprudence on the responsibilities of search engines see below). An unusual detail of the case was the anonymity of the user behind the account, who was nevertheless allowed to submit its views (via its lawyer) to the Court without revealing their identity. Just like in Delfi (ECtHR, see above) the liability of a news platform in relation to its reader’s comments was at stake before an Australian court. In Voller v. Nationwide News (2019) the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia, held that media companies could be considered publishers of comments left by users on their public Facebook pages. Nationwide News and other news outlets shared links to their stories on their Facebook pages about the claimant, Dylan Voller, a juvenile who was mistreated at a detention facility. The articles provoked defamatory comments by other users. The Court, relying on jurisprudence from Australia and other Commonwealth countries, concluded that by maintaining Facebook pages, the media companies made it possible for these comments to become visible and harm the claimant. Thus, the defendants could be considered as publishers of the comments. Furthermore, the Court argued, the media companies should have been aware that stories on this issue would have led to defamatory comments, but failed to make such an assessment and to prevent them. The Court was particularly adamant that the media companies had the technical and resource capacities to moderate and even hide all comments before they became visible, but failed to do it. The Court also dismissed a freedom of expression argument brought forward by the news platform, finding that the media companies maintained Facebook pages for purely financial gain. In Ireland, claimants have successfully sued Facebook for the “misuse of private information” in several cases, forcing it to remove content and to pay damages. In J20 (2020), the High Court of Northern Ireland held that Facebook was responsible for its users’ publications regarding information about a man’s (J20) children, and the accusations that he was a police informant. Since the platform had received a notice on this content and did not act upon it, the claimant was entitled to damages of £3,000 for his emotional distress as a result of the postings. In C.G., the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal found that the disclosure of a sex offender’s photograph, name, address and previous offences, on a Facebook page violated this individual’s right to privacy. The Court based its finding on the ECJ’s Google Spain decision. The Court said that Facebook was —just like in J20—liable as it did not act upon notice. The Court clarified that Facebook was under no obligation to actively monitor the content it stores, and did not have to proactively remove the private information. In the United States Section 230 has been used in cases in which social media platforms were tried for illegal comments as an ultimate shield of protection. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit emphasized this protection in Caraccioli v. Facebook (2017), when it denied claims based on defamation, libel, intrusion upon seclusion, public disclosure of private facts, false light, and others. In this case, an unknown party created a fake Facebook profile of the claimant with multiple sexually explicit images and videos of him. Facebook initially denied the claimant’s request to remove the user’s account and only did so after the claimant’s threat of legal action. The Court pointed out that Section 230 protects Facebook from all liability arising due to its position as “publisher or speaker” of another “information content provider”. For the Court, only if Facebook itself could be considered to be the “information content provider”, a claim could possibly succeed. Merely reviewing the content, however, did not suffice to qualify a social media platform as an “information content provider”. Up to now, the strongest challenge to Section 230 was the Twitter v. Taamneh case in 2023. Several social media companies were sued for their alleged failure to remove terrorist content from their sites by the families of victims of an Islamic State terrorist attack that took place in Istanbul in 2017. The social media platforms were accused of “aiding and abetting” a designated foreign terrorist organization in an “act of international terrorism” under the Antiterrorism Act. This brought up serious questions regarding the extent of the immunity provided for by Section 230, which were discussed heavily by the legal community. While the claimants were successful before the District Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court reversed these decisions. The Court, however, decided to spare out all issues 17