The social network was judged for its lack of collaboration with justice in a case of insulting tweets aiming for a responsible for the prefecture of Yvelines.
Le Monde with AFP
Twitter France and its managing director, Damien Viel, were relaxed, Monday, March 21, by the Versailles Criminal Court. They were judged not to have helped the authorities to identify the authors of two insulting tweets aimed at a person in charge of the Yvelines Prefecture.
“We welcome the decision rendered by the Criminal Court of Versailles which innocent Twitter France and Damien Viel of the facts charged to them,” reacted the company into a statement sent to the France-Presse agency (AFP).
At the hearing, in January, the prosecution had requested the maximum fine against the company and its general manager, judged respectively for “refusal to respond to a requisition” and “complicity of public insult”.
Banking of insults on the network
The case of a tweet of the prefecture of the Yvelines calling for respect for the curfew, in March 2021. This message, all banal sum, showed the secretary general of the prefecture attending control operations.
Anonymously, a user of the social network then responds by comparing the police for the police of Philip Pétain. Another qualifies the leader of the prefecture of “Nazi”, adding: “It would be necessary to hang it on the liberation that.” Relatively common insults on the social network, very often shown by the authorities and associations for his moderation problems.
But the Secretary General of the Prefecture complains and the prosecution of Versailles opens an investigation for insult against the authors of these two tweets. To identify them, the gendarmes send a requisition to Twitter France – it remained dead letter.
At the helm, Mr. Viel had defended by remembering that Twitter France “is an entity that does not store data”, the latter being kept and processed by the European parent company Twitter Inc., located. in Ireland. “I am responsible for the Economic Development of Twitter and no other thing,” he added.
In another procedure, in January, the Paris Court of Appeal forced Twitter to communicate the documents precisely detailing its means of combating hatred online. Several discrimination combination associations had assigned the network, judging that it lacked “ancient and persistent” in its obligations to moderate content.