PARIS — A French court last week told Twitter to identify people who had posted anti-Semitic and racist entries on the social network. Twitter is not sure it will comply in a case marking yet another dust-up in the struggle over speech on the Internet and which countries’ laws prevail.
Thursday’s court order came in a lawsuit brought by French groups who said the Twitter postings, which were made under pseudonyms, broke French law against racist speech.
Twitter has said that under its own rules, it does not divulge the identity of users except in response to a valid court order in the United States, where its data is stored. Twitter has already removed some of the content at issue from its site in France, in keeping with company policy to remove posts in countries where they violate the law.
While the company said in a brief statement that it would review its legal options after the French ruling, officials at the company’s San Francisco headquarters did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Business, Pages 22 on 01/28/2013