Google Is Liable for Defamatory Videos Targeting Lawmaker, Court Rules

“Google did not play a passive role,” the court said, noting that Google benefited from the videos because it earned advertising revenue from all the traffic. “It could control whether or not they remained available on YouTube, yet it chose to do nothing.”

The judge also found that Google, despite having policies prohibiting hate speech, didn’t apply these policies to the videos. Google didn’t seek to explain why it left the videos online after Mr. Barilaro’s lawyers complained, the court said.

Google didn’t have an immediate comment. The company initially put forward some defenses, including that the videos were an honest opinion, but progressively dropped its arguments, according to the court.

In Australia, where there isn’t any constitutionally protected right to free speech and where plaintiff-friendly laws have made it easier to win defamation suits compared with other jurisdictions, courts have taken a hard line in cases involving social-media platforms. In one landmark ruling last year, the country’s highest court ruled that news-media companies posting articles on

Meta Platforms Inc.’s

Facebook were responsible for other users’ comments on those posts.

Michael Douglas, a senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Western Australia, said Monday’s ruling shows social-media companies need to invest more in content moderation.

“When they receive a letter from an Australian lawyer saying, ‘This is defamatory,’ they are going to have to give it some serious thought,” Mr. Douglas said. “Otherwise they risk a bit of a smack from a future court ruling.”

He said Mr. Barilaro’s case would have been unlikely to succeed in the U.S., where public figures like politicians have a much higher bar to prove defamation and where U.S. law broadly exempts social-media companies from legal liability for what people post.

After the videos went online, Mr. Barilaro received harassing messages on social media and was confronted in public. He began to feel uncomfortable going out and left office earlier than he intended, the court said. Mr. Barilaro also sued the author of the videos, but has since settled.

Mr. Barilaro, who was upset that Google failed to apologize, told reporters on Monday that he was happy the case was over.

“You’ve got to be either courageous or stupid to take on Google, and maybe it was a bit of both,” Mr. Barilaro said. “It is unfair for the little guy out there. And I said every day, they don’t have the opportunity to defend their name and go to court. I had that opportunity.”

The judge said although lawmakers like Mr. Barilaro must be prepared to face harsh criticism, the right to criticize isn’t a license to direct hate speech or make baseless attacks.

The court found that the videos were defamatory by implying without evidence that Mr. Barilaro was corrupt and should be in jail, and calling him several derogatory names that referred to his Italian heritage.

Australian lawmakers are in the process of reforming the country’s defamation laws. Some Australian states have passed new legislation designed to unclog courts of trivial claims and support public-interest journalism, according to a statement last year from New South Wales Attorney General Mark Speakman. He said at the time that legal authorities were looking into how liable search engines and social-media sites should be for reputation-damaging material published by third parties.

After the country’s high court found that news media companies were responsible for other people’s comments, legislation was introduced in Australia’s Parliament that sought to make social-media platforms, not the media outlets, explicitly responsible for the comments. The legislation, however, didn’t pass before Parliament was dissolved in April ahead of Australia’s election.

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com