Standard Verlagsgellschaft mbH v. Austria, No. 39378/15, ECtHR (Fourth Section), 7 December 2021

Unjustified court orders against media company to disclose data of authors of offensive comments posted on its Internet news portal as part of a political debate. 

Art. 10 ECHR

1. The applicant company had granted its users a certain degree of anonymity not only to protect its freedom of the press, but also to protect users' privacy and freedom of expression-rights all protected by Articles 8 and 10 of the ECHR. This anonymity would not be effective if the requesting company could not defend it by its own means. It would be difficult for users to defend their anonymity on their own if their identity was revealed to the civil courts. Thus, the interference consisted of the withdrawal of anonymity and its effects. Consequently, the domestic courts' order to disclose the requested users' data constituted an interference with the plaintiff company's right to enjoy freedom of the press. 

2. There is no absolute right to anonymity. And anonymity on the Internet, although an important value, must be balanced with other rights and interests. The importance of sufficient balancing of interests arises from this realization, particularly when it comes to political discourse and public interest debates. The comments made about the plaintiffs, although seriously offensive, had not amounted to hate speech or incitement to violence, nor had they been otherwise clearly illegal. They had been made in the context of a public debate on matters of legitimate public interest, namely the conduct of the politicians in question acting in their public capacity and their own comments posted on the same news portal.
(A news and media company, following the 'inclusion of offensive comments that some users had posted on its portal and which concerned politicians, was ordered in two appellate proceedings to disclose the details of the authors of the comments. The national courts refused to consider the latter as journalistic sources. The plaintiff company complained that its freedom of expression, guaranteed by Article 10 of the ECHR, had been violated).