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Google must pay $515,000 to a former Australian lawmaker who was driven from political office after the tech giant refused to remove videos from YouTube that were deemed defamatory and racist.
Google made money off at least two YouTube videos that unfairly attacked John Barilaro, the then-deputy premier of New South Wales, through videos that were “relentless, racist, vilificatory, abusive and defamatory,” an Australian judge ruled Monday. The two videos, originally posted in 2020, led to Barilaro leaving office, the lawmaker said.
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“Google cannot escape its liability for the substantial damage that [the videos] caused,” Judge Steven Rares said. The content violated Google’s policies on protecting public figures from unfair targeting and “drove Mr. Barilaro prematurely from his chosen service in public life and traumatized him significantly.”
Barilaro sued the tech company for defamation after Google allowed Jordan Shanks, a YouTube creator who goes by the name friendlyjordies, to upload videos in which he would frame the lawmaker as “corrupt” without citing credible evidence, Rares said. Shanks also insulted Barilaro’s Italian heritage and called him names the judge deemed “nothing less than hate speech.”
Google earned thousands of dollars from the pair of videos, which have garnered more than 800,000 views since their debut in the fall of 2020, according to the ruling. Barilaro requested that the videos be taken down in December 2020, but the tech company argued the publisher had the right to share his opinion and to criticize a politician without being punished.
“Once they get our letter and we say, ‘It is defamatory, it is racist, you should take it down,’ and they don’t take it down — then they’re on the hook just like any other publisher,” said Paul Svilans, Barilaro’s lawyer. “They are a trillion-dollar company that facilitated the publication of horribly racist material about John.”
Barilaro previously settled with Shanks in November when the content creator apologized for the videos and paid a $72,000 settlement to the former lawmaker.
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The settlement on Monday may be the first case in which Google was sued for defamation through its YouTube operation, Svilans said. However, the case underscores the question of whether content-sharing websites should share responsibility for defamation carried out by users on their platforms.
“They [Google] were advised that those defamatory videos were there, they looked into it, they decided for themselves that they weren’t, and left them up,” David Rolph, a media law expert at the University of Sydney Law School, told Reuters. “That’s an orthodox application of the basic principles of publication in defamation law (but) leaves the larger question about whether we need to reform the principles of publication.”
