An Australian court on Monday ordered Google to pay a former lawmaker A$715,000 , saying its failure to take down a YouTuber's"relentless, racist, vilificatory, abusive and defamatory campaign" of videos drove him out of politics.
Google has been found liable for defamation before, generally for supplying links to articles in search results, but Monday’s ruling is one of the first where the firm was deemed an active publisher – via YouTube – of content that defamed an elected official. By continuing to publish the content, Google breached its own policies of protecting public figures from being unfairly targeted and “drove Mr Barilaro prematurely from his chosen service in public life and traumatised him significantly,” Rares said.
But Shanks “needed YouTube to disseminate his poison Google was willing to join Mr Shanks in doing so to earn revenue as part of its business model,” the judge said.
A step in the right direction. As legislature I've also suffered at the hands of select individuals who drove smeer campaigns using Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups to garner support.