Japan's Top Court Orders Twitter To Delete Tweets On Arrest Record
Japan's Supreme Court has ordered social media giant Twitter to delete tweets showing a man's arrest record.
The plaintiff, who was arrested on suspicion of intrusion in 2012 and fined about 750 dollars in a summary order, had asked Twitter to remove the tweets.
He argued that the posts, which cited news articles that revealed his name and arrest record, affected his job-search efforts as his information remained accessible.
Regarding removal of online details of arrest histories, the top court ruled in a 2017 decision on search engine Google, that such data could be deleted if protection of privacy clearly outweighs the freedom of making the information public.
Whether the criteria could be applied to Twitter had been a point of contention.
In 2019, a district court ordered Twitter to delete the tweets, arguing that Twitter's operation didn't have a foundation of information distribution like search sites. It also said that as more than seven years had passed since the plaintiff paid the fine, the need to continue disclosing his record had diminished.
But a high court said that the platform did have a foundation of information distribution, and ruled that it was not required to remove the posts. The court said the offense itself was not minor and the posts served the public interests.
In Friday's ruling, presiding justice Kusano Koichi overturned the high court's decision, ordering the removal of the tweets.
It is the first time the Supreme Court has handed down a ruling on deletion of Twitter posts about someone's arrest history.