When social media giants flexed their muscles and took it upon themselves to become the direct arbiters of who may or may not say what on their platforms, they may not have considered what that means when defamatory or libelous content is posted on their platforms.

Social media is a cesspool of nasty discourse and rhetoric. That has been well established. While social media companies have always tried to police clearly hateful and illegal messaging on their platforms to a degree, the urge of conservative voices following the riots in Washington in January brought things to a whole new level. Political leaning, opinion or associations were now grounds for deplatforming as determined by the technocrats and they appointed themselves as judge, jury and executioner in that regard. People justified this by saying “Hey, they are private companies. They can do what they like”. While this is indeed true, it also makes them responsible for everything posted on their watch and the Supreme Court of British Columbia agrees.

The ruling by the BC Supreme court that Twitter can be sued for defamatory content on their platform may have huge repercussions. No longer will those who have been slandered or defamed have to chase down individuals or accounts in order to seek recompense. Now they can simply target the platform which of course has billions more in assets to take from. We can look forward to seeing many more lawsuits launched now and it will be tough for the social media overlords to defend themselves.

Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social media heavyweights made it clear that they ad fully in charge of everything posted on their platforms. That also makes them fully responsible for it. It looks good on them.

Let the legal feeding frenzy begin.