The Paris Commercial Court dismissed the FranceSoir site, which accused Google of cutting advertising and no longer referencing it in its news service because the content violated its rules.
Shopper Union, the publisher of the FranceSoir site, lost all its claims and was sentenced to pay 70,000 euros to Google, for costs incurred by the American group for its defense, according to a sentence issued on September 6, to which the AFP had Wednesday access.
In September 2021, Google cut off this site’s access to its advertising network, thereby depriving it of part of its revenue. This cut occurred a few days after the broadcast of a report on France 2 entitled “Fake News, the money machine”.
A few months earlier, Google had already removed FranceSoir from its Google News service and suspended its YouTube channel. The court considered that Google was within its rights, since Shopper Union clearly violated the rules of use of the three services in question by disseminating conspiratorial content about Covid-19.
tax exempt donations
Google’s rules clearly prohibit, in the field of health, “articles and videos on online press sites contrary to medical consensus, the recommendations of national health authorities and the WHO” or that claim that vaccines authorized in France are “dangerous to health” and that “Alternative treatments exist”, the court underlined. The latter rejected the free speech argument raised by Shopper Union.
Despite the cut in advertising revenue, FranceSoir still has strong sources of funding. The company collects several thousand euros per month through the Tipeee platform, but also tax-free donations. thanks to an association linked to the far-right website Present. The site had for example raised €200,000 in tax-free donations – at the time through the spill – in just one month, in September 2021.
If Google has decided to take action against FranceSoir, the site is still present on Twitter (145,000 subscribers) and Facebook (195,000 subscribers). He recently spread false information about the vaccination of pregnant women, taken up by Professor Didier Raoult.
Source: BFM TV
