Judge gives internet giants one month to permanently remove defamatory video clip

Arrangements must be made within the next month to permanently remove an internet video clip falsely accusing a student of taxi fare evasion, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.

Mr Justice Micheal Peart made the order in a case brought by Eoin McKeogh, aged 23, a DCU student, against YouTube, Google, Facebook, and a number of websites over the video and accompanying material which wrongly identified Mr McKeogh as a man leaving a taxi without paying the fare in Monkstown, Dublin.

Mr McKeogh sought a mandatory injunction requiring the internet companies to permanently remove the video and other material having previously got a temporary order preventing its republishing.

Yesterday, Mr Justice Peart ordered that experts for Mr McKeogh meet with experts for the internet firms on how to go about taking down the material permanently on a worldwide basis. The experts should be nominated within 14 days and the meeting between them take place within the following fortnight. When reports have been prepared and exchanged, the matter can come back before the court to “consider the position which emerges”, the judge said.

Mr Justice Peart previously found Mr McKeogh was grossly defamed in the video because he was incontrovertibly not the person in it. He gave this ruling when refusing a separate bid by Mr McKeogh to stop newspapers from identifying him.

In dealing with his application for a permanent injunction against the internet companies yesterday, pending full hearing of his action for damages over the matter, the judge said after the taxi driver involved had posted the video asking if anyone could identify the person in his cab, one person wrongly named Mr McKeogh who was in Japan at the time.

There followed, the judge said, “a miscellany of the most vile, crude, obscene and generally obnoxious comments” about Mr McKeogh on YouTube and Facebook. The clip went viral and “all manner of nasty and seemingly idle minds got to work on the plaintiff and as seems to happen with apparent impunity nowadays on social media sites”, posted whatever vile and abusive first thing that came into their “vacant, idle and meddlesome heads”, the judge said.