"The High Court in this case has decided that if you are the host of a Facebook page, you are going to be treated as publisher, even though the comments are put there by a third party."
Is the blog displayed on your domain or theirs? To what extent do they moderate content you have on the blog? Do they promote your blog to other users of WordPress?
I feel like if the answers to those questions change the outcome, then the problem is more nuanced than a single line quote followed by "that's just insane". Especially since I think it's more than possible to come up with a list of questions that justify the court's decision.
(Probably something like "does the news org initiate the discussion, do they have the ability to moderate the discussion, does their branding appear prominently on the page").
Although insane, I do want strict regulations for Facebook pages. A Facebook page can be sold to anyone, So obviously pages with large number of followers get lot of buy requests often from malicious actors.
After years of not using Facebook I found that I'm part of Facebook pages which I don't remember ever following. Which was one of the reasons I deleted the account, I do not want to be accused of following pages involved in criminal activities when I actually followed cute kittens pages 10 years ago.
How high up do we go though? Is it the news org that created the space for comments? The website owner who created the tools to create a space? The hosting platform who provided the space to host the website? Or the ISP who delivered those comments to the user?
If facebook is responsible, why not the ISP as well? Maybe we should accept that platforms like facebook and reddit are similar to VPS hosting companies where we delegate the legal responsibility down further to the one who used the software to create the space.
This might actually be a good thing as delegating down means a much larger group of people moderating and those people moderate as they see fit but become legally responsible for their actions.
I think you are heading in the right direction. I think it all comes down to moderation.
If Facebook was and unmoderated wild west with a linear timeline, then people would know they have to self moderate.
Facebook as made some decisions about what is acceptable, then actively promotes that content to other people, that is taking responsibility for the content, so they should be held responsible as well.
Note that Facebook was a not a respondent in the original defamation case. In any case, multiple parties can be responsible for publication. From point 55 of the judgement:
> The Court of Appeal was correct to hold that the acts of the appellants in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments.
That's because Facebook is not here in Australia, much deeper pockets, and we already have bullshit laws that consider Google and Facebook carriers (like a telephone company) not publishers.
But lets be clear, telephone and electricity companies don't moderate your content, or use algorithms that makes some content easier to find than others.
Even obvious by the definition of "publisher" for the purposes of that law? I'd think if it was obvious, the courts wouldn't have the opposite opinion. The fact that the newspaper has the power to stop the publication of the comments proves they have a lot of power like a publisher.
Facebook has even more power to stop the publishing of those comments though.
ISPs also have the power to stop the publishing of those comments. In fact, ISPs are necessary to facilitate the publishing of any comments on the internet.