IAPP Piece Explores Jurisdictional Implications of French Court’s Privacy/Hate Speech Dilemma

The original injunction, which was issued by a French lower court judge in January, also ordered Twitter to install a mechanism that would enable users to inform Twitter of illegal content more easily. While Twitter instituted a new mechanism for reporting illegal content, it appealed the order to disclose its users’ identities, citing potential privacy implications.

In a detailed analysis of the court’s order for the IAPP Privacy Perspectives blog, Chris Wolf of Hogan Lovells’ Washington, DC office and Winston Maxwell of the Paris office describe how the order, issued directly by the French court to California-based Twitter, which does not have a French establishment, implicates jurisdictional issues and calls into question the use of anonymity as a privacy shield to post hate speech online.

Authored by the HL Chronicle of Data Protection Team