See also Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute At Columbia University 141 S. Ct. 1220 (2021), Michal Lavie "Decontextualization: On the Responsibility of Online Intermediaries for Secondary Distribution and Impact on Information Availability," Law Studies 31 491 (2018).
Thus, for example, it is possible to consider the application of a more moderate test than the test proposed by the plaintiffs in their summaries for examining Massadat's tort liability, which is broader than the clear lying test. It can be argued that once a notice and removal request has been submitted by a person who claims to have been harmed by an advertisement on the establishment, the establishment is obligated to contact the advertiser and ask for his position on this request, and to remove the publication or refuse to remove it, while considering the advertiser's position, which will also be brought before the person requesting removal.
This possibility, the lekuta in the field of public law (which derives from the obligations of hearing and transparency to which a public authority is obligated) may have many implications, which go beyond the scope of our discussion here. Since the plaintiffs did not make this claim in the statement of claim or in their summaries, and did not present this front, I do not express any position in relation to this, and the matter should be left to the time being.
In light of all of the above, the lawsuit against Google and Meta is dismissed.
The Claim Against Defendant 4
- As may be recalled, defendant 4 published a response to the publication of the subject of file 10 in which it was written: "Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak said to burn (such!) The books of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef." In his defense, he claimed that he was shocked by the publication in which it was stated that the plaintiff had said so (p. 370 of the transcript), and that he had intended in good faith the question of the response in a manner that expressed astonishment at the publication, but that he mistakenly omitted the question mark from the end of the trial. Defendant 4 added that his education is minimal, he has many spelling mistakes, does not know how to use punctuation marks, and is not proficient in technology.
- Defendant No. 4 further argued in his summaries that the aforementioned publication does not constitute defamation at all, that it is a repetition of the defamation that was stated in the past, and that he has the defenses of good faith in a collective dispute (1), (3) and (4) in section 15 of the Prohibition of Defamation Law. It was also claimed that this was a negligible event that was protected by trivial matters.
- A statement according to which a person, let alone a rabbi, ordered the burning of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's books, constitutes defamation, since it is an offensive expression that degrades and humiliates a person, all the more so when a person belongs to a religious or ultra-Orthodox community.
I do not believe that the defense of expressing the opinion set forth in section 15(4) of the Prohibition of Defamation Law is available to defendant 4, since according to his own approach, and according to his version, he intended to publish the response as an innocent question (with a question mark at the end) and not as an expression of opinion about the plaintiff. In other words, an advertiser cannot be entitled to the protection of expressing an opinion, if his version is that he did not intend to express an opinion, since it is a matter of secrecy letter. The other defenses that defendant 4 claimed in his summaries are also not available to him, since I find it difficult to understand their relevance to the matter at hand.