One of South Africa’s foremost social media lawyers has warned that WhatsApp group admins could land in big legal trouble for their members’ messages.
The Digital Law Company’s social media expert Emma Sadleir has warned WhatsApp group admins should take note of a recent update to the app that could hold them legally liable for other users’ posts., Sadleir described the WhatsApp update as a “game-changer” under South African law.
“It really brings to an end the debate we’ve been having for a long time in legal circles about whether or not an admin of a WhatsApp group is responsible for content on that group,” Sadleir said. WhatsApp recently started rolling out the ability for group admins to delete messages of other participants in a chat,Sadleir explained that South African law determined that admins of groups were legally responsible for the content they could remove but chose not to.
“If you are the admin of a WhatsApp group, because of this change, you become legally responsible for everything that appears on that group,” Sadleir said. “If somebody is abusing a group, they are sending hate speech, threats, incitement, racism, any content which is illegal, if you don’t delete the content, you become legally responsible for it.”