New EU regulations will have serious implications for newsrooms worldwide

"In a recent paper, Daphne Keller, director of Intermediary Liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, points out that whether and how content hosts—such as social media companies—must honor RTBF requests under the GDPR is unclear. While current RTBF case law is largely limited to search engines like Google, what constitutes “search” and “listing” could include search results on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Given that the regulation imposes stiff penalties for failure to remove personal data content in a timely way, Keller speculates that these hosts may simply remove material without first weighing the interests of readers alongside those of complainants. Though the European Commission’s advisory group on the GDPR specifically stipulates that RTBF complaints will not result in removing content on a publisher’s website, for example, the implications for content posted directly (and sometimes only) to social media sites is not yet apparent."