> I've never once believed that Meta would honor / fight for anonymous accounts of any kind on their platform.
The way I see it is that they are honoring anonymity and they are being compelled by the court to release personal information after initially refusing to do so.
The problem is with the courts, not with Meta. Ideally they should just eat the 100K fine.
"Ideally they should just eat the 100K fine." , I don't see that happening with their current leadership; a half-fought court battle for PR sake seems on brand though.
Is it that straightforward? You can slander anyone and/or reveal their private information without the 'victim' having no recourse whatsoever besides complaining to FB?
No, but this seems completely tangential to what is discussed in the article. If understand it correctly:
- Person A anonymously published some supposedly defamatory information about person B on platform X
- Platform X knows who person B is
- While it's not determined that the information was indeed slanderous* the court compels platform X to reveal the identity of person A.
- Person A sues person B in civil court etc.
This does not seem to be at all unreasonable to me.
*only thing I'm really concerned about is that while obviously (given how legal systems work) you can't determine whether it was slander or not without both parties, the court should still try to determine whether the accusation is at least somewhat valid before compelling the platform to reveal that person's identity.
Of course some could say that eventually this might lead to situations where governments would restrict/ban any platform which allows users to post without revealing their person details to the platform (and well Facebook already does that on their own). That would of course be terrible..
I think it's far from ideal that Facebook and some other platforms force you to reveal your identity. However once they have, I don't see how can it be unreasonable for a court to able to compel them to reveal the identify of one of their users in certain cases.
I don't see how Online Safety Bill is related? It's not like the identity of anonymous posters on FB is E2E encrypted and requiring an order from a court to reveal it is not exactly the same as 'screening of all user content'..
Obviously courts should consider severity and other factors but factors like damage to reputation, other damages etc. should be the deciding factor on whether a court would accept the case not whether it's published on Facebook or anonymously.