As far as I can tell, the problem is that google surfaced posts claiming she was a stalker, when she merely lied about a psychic having caused her friend to commit suicide in posts about that psychic. Or something.
Google appears to be still allowed to surface content which is defamatory, but they still have a publisher's duty to remove it once notified, I think this is key from the summary (linked elsewhere in the discussion):
> […] because [Google] was on notice that the material was defamatory and refused to remove the information, it could not be found to have innocently circulated the information
It seems like under Australian law there's a concept of a "secondary publisher" of defamatory content, which would typically be a bookstore or library. So, the actual publisher, author, etc. can be held liable for defamation, but also, if the bookstore has been notified that it is selling a defamatory book and does not take it off the shelf, it too can be held liable.
In this case, the woman notified Google that their search results for her were defamatory, Google did not take them down, and Google was held to be a secondary publisher because their algorithm actively determined what URL to show, what snippet to show, etc.
The second lawsuit was about the auto-complete where ever time you searched her name it'd suggest appending "psychic stalker" to it. So it'd be more akin to every time you ordered coffee from startbucks they wrote down "Dude, Physic Stalker" on your cup every time.
I don't think it's reasonable for Google to remove content whenever someone just says its defamatory, in the absence of a court finding that it's actually defamatory. Otherwise we'd quickly lose every reference to Biden winning the 2020 election once it was widely known that the rule existed.
They don't have to remove content whenever someone just says its defamatory.
They have to remove defamatory content once someone has told them it's defamatory. Essentially the ball is put into Google's court at the point, with the question: are you willing to defend this as non-defamatory? Which is the same question all primary publishers face.
