On Monday, an Australian court ordered Google to pay a former senior executive A$715,000 ($515,000) after concluding that a YouTube commentator’s “determined, bigoted, vilifying, damaging, and insulting attempt” prompted him to abruptly cease legislative concerns.
The Federal Court found that Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL.O) Google, which owns the content-sharing website YouTube, made a lot of money from two recordings aimed at the delegate chief of Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, that have been watched almost a million times since late 2020.
The recordings of political analyst Jordan Shanks probed the uprightness of legislator John Barilaro, including labelling him “evil” without evidence and calling him prejudiced insults that were “nothing more than contemptuous language,” according to the appointed authority, Steve Rares.
Rares stated that when Barilaro resigned from the government in October 2021, it was because he “was hurt by Google’s and Mr. Shanks’ objectives and… it caused him to resign hastily.”
I saw Google’s leadership in this operation as ill-advised and without foundation.
A Google spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
A spokesman for Shanks, who was a co-litigant with Google until he and Barilaro reached a settlement with the company last year, was not immediately available for comment.
