Yes, it’s time for this week’s edition of “how is the EU fucking up the internet.” Over the summer we wrote about an important case in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), warning that the Advocate General’s recommendations would lead to mass filtering and censorship of the internet, seemingly going against existing law and precedent that supports freedom of expression and which says that automated filtering violates human rights. Welp. So much for that.

Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook is really, really bad. If you don’t recall, the case dealt with an Austrian politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, who got really upset for comments on Facebook that called her a “lousy traitor of the people,” a “corrupt oaf,” and a member of a “fascist party.” While one may regret this level of political discourse, it is pretty typical. I mean, that last one is basically a part of Godwin’s Law, which shows just how common it is for such an accusation to be thrown around. However, Glawischnig-Piesczek sued Facebook. In the US, thanks to Section 230, Facebook clearly wouldn’t be liable for such statements. In Europe, with the much less strict E-commerce Directive, an Austrian court not only found that Facebook must remove such content, but that the block should be global and that “equivalent content” must also be blocked.

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As Stanford Law’s Daphne Keller explains in this excellent thread, a huge part of the problem here is that the users of Facebook are not represented in court — so the court only was determining if mandated filters would harm Facebook’s rights, and the answer is no. But that ignores that these decisions will impact the rights of basically all of Facebook’s users.