When is Facebook liable for illegal content under the E-commerce Directive? CG v. Facebook in the Northern Ireland courts

The ubiquity of social media platforms and their significance in disseminating information (true or false) to potentially wide groups of people was highly unlikely to have been in the minds of the European legislators when they agreed, in 2000, the e-Commerce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC) (ECD). Facebook itself was launched only in 2004.

Despite the changing times and technological capabilities, the European Commission has decided not to revise the ECD, specifically its safe harbour provisions for intermediaries, in its current single digital market programme. Although the ECD seems set to remain unchanged, the application of the safe harbour provisions raises many difficult questions which have not yet been fully answered at EU level by the Court of Justice. CG v. Facebook ([2016] NICA 54), a decision of the Northern Irish Court of Appeal, illustrates some of these difficulties and certainly raises questions about the proper interpretation of the ECD and its relationship with the Data Protection Directive.