In addition, the witness Mr. Edward Mulcrone testified before me on behalf of Google, who basically repeated Gustafson's words and the contribution of his testimony to the hearing was relatively marginal.
- Goode's testimony was also irrelevant to the hearing of the lawsuit. His interrogation revealed that he was not part of the team that examines complaints about content on Facebook, did not take part in the process of examining the posts, did not know who on Facebook took part in the review process, did not watch the videos and did not speak Hebrew. He was not involved in the examination or the removal notice sent by the plaintiffs, nor was he familiar with the Facebook page on which the publications were published, and was not involved in the decisions regarding their removal (pp. 219-229).
- However, despite the lack of relevance of the testimonies, this does not raise or lower the issue of the outcome. The question that the plaintiffs posed in the statement of claim and in their summaries as a question that needs to be decided is whether the very fact that the publications contain defamation and attribute criminal acts to them requires their removal by the establishment. As stated, the answer to this is that since it has not been proven that this is a clear lie on the face of it, the establishment was not negligent in failing to remove it. At the end of the day, this is a normative question and not a question that requires a factual decision. Therefore, the testimonies of the witnesses of Meta and Google have no bearing on the matter of deciding the question that the plaintiffs placed as a matter of decision.
- More than necessary, I will add that the time may have come to expand the tort liability of institutions in relation to publications in them, beyond the test of clear falsehood, and to apply new tests to examine their refusal to remove wrongful publication, using duties in the field of public law, and from a view of the institutions as dual entities subject to normative duality, and through the funnel of tort law. In this regard, see N. Mor, "Online Social Networks as Arenas for Shaping and Allocating Rights: Towards the Application of Public Law Duties," Din Ve-Devarim 14 127 (2020), at p. 186, where it is stated:
"Recognition of the public nature of social networks and the need to apply obligations from public law to them does not mean that these duties must apply in the same way or to the same extent that they are applied to governmental authorities. Recognition of the legitimate commercial interests of social networks and other considerations will certainly require adjustments and changes in the public standards that apply to them, but this will not change the main point: the social networks will be required to act to ensure that their conduct is appropriate in both the substantive sense and the deliberative manner. The application of these norms can be done through the courts (for example, by applying the doctrine of normative duality), but also through legislative tools, such as effective legislation or updating existing legislation."