Voller’s barrister Tom Molomby SC declared it was "a very novel case", while James Hmelnitsky SC, acting for the three media companies, opted for "crunchy and interesting, from a defamation point of view".

Just to set the scene of what it can be like when lawyers discuss social media, here is Molomby explaining the concept of clicking a link: "Those snippets or extracts [posted on the Facebook page] have what’s called a preview hyperlink attached to them. The user of Facebook can read the extract, or play the snippet where it’s a video, and the user can choose to go further and activate the preview hyperlink, which takes the user to the full video or the original article which the person can obviously read."

Thankfully, there is a degree of self awareness. Early in the hearing Justice Stephen Rothman joked: "Remind me Mr Molomby — Facebook is something on the internet, is it?"

Molomby replied that as far as his acquaintance with the social network went, "I would describe myself as someone in the sandpit with the alphabet building blocks."

Rothman later added: "Surprisingly given my position as a judge of the court, I do know how Facebook works. The court has a Facebook page I think, but I’ve never liked it."



The first witness was a man who well and truly knows how Facebook works: Ryan Shelley, a social media consultant who wrote an expert report for Voller’s case about comment monitoring on Facebook pages.

Shelley told the court that on public business pages, like those run by the media companies, you cannot turn off the comment function. But, he added, you can deploy a "hack" that effectively does the same thing.

Shelley’s hack involves putting 100 of the most commonly used words in the English language ("a", "the", etc) on a Facebook filter list, causing any comment containing those words to be automatically hidden from the public.

Only the commenter, their Facebook friends and the person running the page would be able to see the comment. The hack would automatically hide a large number of comments, and moderators could monitor and unhide them as appropriate, Shelley said.

Shelley conceded that a one word post such as "criminal" or "rapist" would not be blocked using this strategy. Picture comments would also slide through.



"So in all those cases of someone posting a single word that is not on the list, a single picture, this hack does nothing to stop it?" Hmelnitsky asked.

"That is correct," Shelley replied.

The hack also can’t be turned on for just one post: "When it’s on it’s on, when it’s off it’s off," Shelley said.

Shelley also suggested companies could use random sampling to monitor for problematic comments. Instead of checking every comment, which would generally take a lot of time, companies could check every 2nd, 10th, 50th, etc.

It’s not perfect, Shelley said, but if a couple of comments were potentially defamatory, it could signal a larger problem and call for certain posts to be monitored more closely: "When there’s smoke there’s fire."

In response to Shelley, the media companies put a series of social media editors on the stand to explain how they actually run various Facebook pages — and why the hack, in their view, is not viable.

Timothy Love, the head of digital at ANC, is responsible for the Sky News Australia and Bolt Report Facebook pages. He told the court he regularly hides comments that are offensive or discriminatory, so that only the commenter and their friends can see it.

ANC also uses a filter list of about 150 words — profanities, commonly misspelled variations of profanities, and racist slurs such as the n-word — to automatically hide comments containing those words, Love said.

The court heard that Facebook already has a profanity filter that can be turned on or off, but some media outlets maintain a list of their own as well.

Love told the court he rarely blocked users from commenting altogether, but had resorted to this a few times, particularly during the postal survey on same-sex marriage: "There was some users who were very passionate about that and made their thoughts known in ways we thought were unacceptable."

Brighette Ryan, digital night editor at The Australian, agreed that she rarely blocked people outright, offering this bleak explanation: "The necessity to block users isn’t really there, because if they are abusing another user normally they might be swearing, so the comment would be hidden anyway."

Ryan said Shelley’s hack would probably work in getting rid of most comments, but said "it wouldn’t make sense" as it would involve someone sitting and unhiding comments all day.

In response, Molomby offered the radical — possibly even utopian, to some — suggestion of a world with no comments section.

"I rather meant it as, you would never have any comments," he said to Ryan. "You would be on the Facebook page with the snippet of the article … but there just wouldn’t be any comments there. Ever. Unless some slip through, and the few that slip through would be dealt with fairly easily because there would be so few and they’d be fairly short. Why couldn’t that be done?"

"It’s not the way … I imagine our users would get frustrated," Ryan said. "People go onto Facebook to comment. And if comments weren’t appearing it would defeat the purpose of the page, one of the purposes of the page."

"So as News [Corp] sees it, for users, the ability to comment is really important?"

"Yes."