A Dublin City University (DCU) student wrongly branded a taxi fare dodger arising from a viral YouTube video has won a major victory in a High Court action against tech giants Facebook and Google. Eoin McKeogh from Co. Kildare is close to securing an order for all material arising from this clip to be taken down from the web permanently on a world-wide basis.

The incontrovertible evidence is that he was in Japan at the time of the taxi fare evasion and so it could not have been him in the video.

However having been named online as the culprit he was subjected to what Mr. Justice Michael Peart has described as 'a miscellany of the most vile, crude, obscene, and generally obnoxious comments' on both YouTube and Facebook.

"All manner of nasty and seemingly idle minds got to work on the plaintiff, and as seems to happen with apparent impunity these days on social media sites said whatever thing first came into their vacant, idle and meddlesome heads'' the judge added.

Temporary order against companies

The 23-year-old DCU student got a temporary order in January last year against Internet companies including Facebook and Google, stopping the material from being republished. He failed to gag 6 national newspapers from naming him during the court case.

The video was taken down but Eoin McKeogh now wants all online defamatory material arising from the posting to be removed permanently on a world-wide basis.

Mr. Justice Peart accepts that is 'no easy task' especially for an amateur in the absence of co-operation from Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube. He says he can understand why these tech giants might not wish to open a floodgate but he expresses surprise they have not been more helpful given Eoin McGeogh's obvious innocence.

Google and YouTube argued European directives protect against liability for defamatory material created by the users of internet service providers.