Could a revenge porn case in Northern Ireland change Facebook across the planet?
Facebook is massive. More people use Facebook than live in the nation of China. And like any giant international operation, its size opens Facebook up to a barrage of varied lawsuits, most of which are not worth paying attention to.
A revenge porn lawsuit filed against the social media company that made headlines earlier this month, however, is worth keeping tabs on.
A 14-year-old girl in Northern Ireland sued the company for damages after a naked photo of her was published multiple times on the social network. Earlier this month, a judge in Belfast threw out Facebook's attempt to get the case dismissed. The girl is also suing the man who published the photo.
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Facebook says it deleted the photo when it was told that it had been published. The girl, who is not named in the lawsuit, argues she shouldn't have had to tell Facebook more than once. Facebook has said it uses something called PhotoDNA, which "can proactively detect child exploitation material on the site, and in some cases, can prevent it from ever being uploaded."
In the United States, this lawsuit would almost certainly not stand a chance.
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act allows social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others to host words and images published to their networks by other people without fear of being sued over the content. If someone calls for violence against a group of people on Facebook, section 230 protects the social network from being sued for hate speech.
But the European Union has only what experts have termed a "watered down" version of this law.
In the E.U., companies aren't liable so long as they do something about offensive content when a user alerts them. The case in Northern Ireland may come down to whether the court rules that Facebook did enough.
For Facebook, the most explosive result would be a loss that results in sweeping changes to how it deals with sexually explicit content, no matter whether that content is uploaded in Europe, the U.S., or anywhere else.
"If they are liable for allowing revenge porn posts to stay up in other countries, they have to either have a different policy in each country or change the rule in the U.S. too," Mark Lemley, the director of Stanford University's Program in Law, Science, and Technology, told Mashable. "Internet companies sometimes do have different rules in different countries...but it's harder to administer and it requires the company to figure out where its users are. At some point it becomes easier to just have a uniform rule."
Other experts say a uniform rule is unlikely even if the girl's lawsuit is successful.
"It is fairly easy for all these companies to figure out where all this data is coming from," Danielle Citron, who authored Hate Crimes in Cyberspace and has advised Facebook and Twitter on their harassment policies over the years, told Mashable. Figuring out where data comes from isn't an exact science, she said, but Facebook could develop different nude imagery policies for different regions, conceding to the Irish lawsuit while not stirring up a free speech controversy in the U.S.
Facebook, like all companies, also has its reputation to consider.
The social network -- along with Reddit and Twitter -- banned revenge porn in early 2015, but there's always some potential that the case in Northern Ireland could turn into a public relations nightmare, something that generates headlines that read like "giant corporation tries to crush young victim of online sexual abuse."
Citron doesn't think anything "seismic" will happen, but she said there's a far outside chance that Facebook will come out with a blanket policy to guard against similar lawsuits in the future, such as banning nudity altogether.
"Maybe nudity is one of those things where, culturally, users won't lose their minds," she said.
No matter where the case goes, Bradley Shear, a lawyer with a focus on social media law, told Mashable that he thinks Facebook will be in court for a while.
"I would think that they would probably draw this out, because there's major potential ramifications for the company if she wins" or if they compensate her, Shear said. "I doubt that this young girl is alone in this happening."
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Danielle Citron had worked with Reddit on its harassment policies. Citron has worked with Facebook and Twitter, but not Reddit.
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Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
