High Court puts muzzle on Facebook trolls

In effect the Court's decision means the person owning that Facebook (or social media) page is legally liable for any comments posted to it. It's going to be a real test of our cyber and defamation laws.

Another key factor is that the defamation occurs at the time of posting, not just after notification to the page owner of comments posted to the owner's page.

So you could have a Facebook page and someone trolls it leaving defamatory remarks about someone and even though you may not yet know about these remarks, the defamation will be deemed to have occurred.

The courts have long held that a person can be defamed by the remarks posted by others on social media platforms such as Facebook.

Last year the issue made headlines when the Principal of Gold Coast Tamborine Mountain State High School won a defamation action against several parents for comments about her posted on social media.

The action, which was costly and spanned several years, did not involve media companies, but illustrates that the general public is not immune from defamation liability for rants on Facebook.

In its decision on the Voller matter, the High Court rejected the media companies' argument that, to be a publisher, an outlet must know of the relevant defamatory matter and intend to convey it.

The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments.

This decision now clears the way for Mr Voller's defamation action to proceed. The Court's decision did not relate to the defamation but focused on whether the media companies were liable for comment posted on their social media pages.

The decision will have wide reaching consequences for businesses, organisations, sports bodies and individuals with pages on social media.

Trolls and nasty keyboard abusers usually try to hide behind their anonymity in a flame war and use other people's pages to share their abuse. If the Court is making the page owner liable it's going to see tougher crackdowns and for media companies, more intensive and timely moderating of posts.

Individuals will also need to be doubly wary about who can post comments to their pages.