An Australian court ordered Google to pay $515,000 to a former legislator after the company failed to remove a YouTuber's "relentless, racist, vilification, abusive, and defamatory campaign" of videos.
The Federal Court determined that Alphabet Inc, which owns YouTube, profited from two videos criticising the then-deputy premier of New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, that had been seen about 800,000 times since they were released in late 2020.
Google has previously been found responsible for defamation, usually for providing links to articles in search results, but Monday's decision is one of the first in which the company was found to be an active publisher of information that defamed an elected official via YouTube.
A study of defamation legislation in Australia is looking into whether internet platforms should be held liable for defamatory information they host. Google and other internet behemoths claim that they can't be expected to monitor every single post. A Google spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Jordan Shanks, a content producer, allegedly released videos in which he repeatedly labels politician John Barilaro "corrupt" without presenting reliable proof and insults his Italian ethnicity, which the judge, Steve Rares, called "nothing less than hate speech."
Google broke its policy of safeguarding public figures from being unjustly targeted by continuing to post the information and "drove Mr Barilaro prematurely from his chosen service in public life and traumatised him significantly," Rares said.
(Inputs from various outlets)