Google faces libel suit in Hong Kong for ‘white powder’ search result
Court of Appeal upholds request from Oriental Press Group to sue US tech giant for a result that allegedly implicates the local firm in drug trafficking
Google is one step closer to being caught up in a full-blown court battle in Hong Kong after the city judges on Tuesday refused to set aside a libel suit in which the US tech giant’s search engine was accused of implying a local media group was associated with heroin.
The libel suit stemmed from search results and several websites administered by the California-based firm. Oriental Press Group argued in the suit that when their lawyers searched for “white powder newspaper” in Chinese, the group’s name and its newspapers, Oriental Daily and The Sun, would appear in the results.
Google faces people problems as focus shifts to artificial intelligence race
“White powder” is a colloquial term for heroin in Cantonese, the newspaper argued. The results caused people to misunderstand that the group and its newspapers were founded with money earned from drug trafficking, which they are still involved in, they said.
Four other websites administered by Google also featured what the group called the defamatory phrase, according to the Oriental Press.
But since Google is headquartered in the United States, the newspaper applied and won permission from the Court of First Instance in 2016 to serve court papers in another jurisdiction despite objections from Google’s lawyers.
The Court of Appeal on Tuesday upheld the lower court’s ruling. With the green light to serve the court document, the ruling means the suit will proceed to a full trial, as the US firm is expected to defend itself in a Hong Kong court.