❊ Suing Facebook Critics in Lebanon

As time goes by and Facebook becomes ever more ubiquitous, we will be witnessing more and more cases like this, where M.P. Sami Gemayel has decided to sue some of his Facebook critics.

While there’s nothing wrong in principle in suing people because of something they wrote on Facebook (the network, after all, is simply a mirror of the offline world), my concern is about the ability of the Lebanese justice system to cope.

Let’s say you sue someone on Facebook. That person is then spooked, deletes the offending message and makes his profile very private, or worse, delete his entire account. How can the prosecutor gather evidence?

In previous cases, printed transcripts of Facebook wall conversations were produced as evidence. But those can be easily tampered with, either with photoshop or by hacking that person’s account and posting in his name. Do you summon “Wall witnesses”? The Lebanese law is not really clear on the matter.

There is no easy answer (except perhaps grow some thick skin and ignore the online critics). In the US, a legal discovery process can force Facebook to provide evidence because Facebook is an American company. There’s even a team in Facebook dedicated to combatting offending and hate speech, and there’s a mechanism to contact it to delete offensive content and even ban users.

But unless Lebanon has some sort of legal agreement with the US, I can’t see how we can have a fair trial that involves anything that was said on Facebook.