In a legal first, a Belgian court of appeal has ordered Meta to pay €27,779 in damages to Vlaams Belang MEP Tom Vandendriessche after ruling that Facebook’s parent company had unfairly shadow banned the conservative politician for his ‘hateful’ posts, reports the European Conservative.
The court ruled that the social media giant had unfairly censored the conservative politician for his ‘hateful’ posts, Belgian media report.
It is the first time a social media platform has been legally penalized for implementing such a ‘shadow ban’—a process which Meta has always denied ever employing, and which appears nowhere in its Terms of Service. Shadowbanning is the widely used name for hiding users or their content from view without making the process explicit to the user. The person targeted is never notified by the social media company responsible, creating the impression that his message is not resonating with an audience.
The ruling provides concrete evidence of the censorious way technology companies aim to control the narrative by voluntarily imposing ‘European (Union) values’ on internet users.
While leftist-operated social media firms and allied liberal media have often painted shadowbanning as a conspiracy theory concocted by the Right, the Twitter Files, released since Elon Musk took over the platform now renamed X, showed it to be a routine operational mechanism.
This specific shadow ban dates back to February 2021, when Meta first placed it on Tom Vandendriessche’s Facebook page. As a result, his posts became less visible, significantly decreasing their reach.
It did not stop there for Vandendriessche, however, as a few months later, his advertising account was blocked outright, with temporary restrictions being placed on his access to it.
Meta supported the measure by arguing that some of Vandendriessche’s posts had violated Facebook’s guidelines, including ‘hate speech’ and ‘support for hateful organizations’. But, as the court determined, the social media giant could not produce any evidence for this.
Following the ruling, the MEP wrote on X that it was a “first victory against Big Tech.”
In a separate press release from his party, Vandendriessche said that taking a tech giant to court is “practically impossible,” since “you don’t enter the fight on a level playing field. I hope this ruling makes it clear to Facebook that they can no longer censor me, together with many citizens, without consequences.”
