Companies, politicians are using GDPR to shut journalists up, report warns

Companies, entrepreneurs and politicians are increasingly leaning on the EU's data protection rules to force journalists to back away from critical reporting about them, a new report has warned. 

The report into SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuits and Against Public Participation] across Europe also notes that an EU-wide law intended to shield the media from such lawsuits must be bolstered if it is to work as intended.

Now in its fourth edition, the annual SLAPPs Report, prepared by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation on behalf of the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE), tracks reports of SLAPP cases across 29 European countries.    

In 2024 alone, 167 new SLAPP cases were filed across those 29 jurisdictions. Italy led the pack with 21 new suits, followed by Germany (20) and Serbia (13).

Weaponising GDPR 

More than two out of every three of those new SLAPP suits were filed by businesspeople or politicians. Most focused on reporting about alleged corruption and environmental issues. 

While traditionally SLAPP cases leaned on defamation laws when making legal arguments, there is a growing trend for claimants citing GDPR-related ‘right to erasure’ provisions to try and force media houses to delete published stories.

The GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is the EU's principal data protection law. The regulation includes provisions allowing data subjects to request the deletion of information about them. While the GDPR includes a public interest exemption, requests are assessed on a case-by-case basis and the exemption is regularly challenged.  

“Abusers are testing and deploying data protection law as a substitute for defamation, thereby accelerating censorship through the threat of immediate regulatory action,” the report warns.

Claimants are also leveraging copyright claims to try and suppress reporting, filing lawsuits on the basis of copyright breaches without ever having to contest the factual accuracy of reporting about them, the report said.  

SLAPP suits are not only targeting journalists, the report notes: in some cases companies have filed lawsuits against reviewers who posted negative reviews about their services online.         

Over 90% of SLAPP cases could be exposed

Of the 1,303 SLAPP cases tracked by the initiative between 2010 and 2024, a massive 91 per cent could potentially not be covered by the EU’s anti-SLAPP law.

The EU introduced an anti-SLAPP law in May 2024 and member states have until May of this year to transpose it into national law. Malta transposed the law that same year.

However, that law only applies to cross-border SLAPP lawsuits, in which journalists or media houses in one member state are vexatiously sued by a party in another.

More than nine out of every 10 SLAPP lawsuits are domestic, the CASE report notes. While the EU law defines “cross-border” quite broadly, report writers warn that the vast majority of SLAPP cases fall under the “domestic” definition and will therefore not qualify for protection under the EU law.

The EU-wide law, which has been informally dubbed ‘Daphne’s law’ in memory of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, would ironically not have protected Caruana Galizia from the SLAPP suits she faced, as those lawsuits were filed by Malta-based claimants.

Caruana Galizia faced 48 separate lawsuits at the time of her murder, with many of those cases inherited by her relatives following her death.  

Malta has so far shot down pressure to bolster its anti-SLAPP law to also cover domestic SLAPP cases.

Tip of the iceberg

The 1,303 documented SLAPP cases flagged by the report are most likely the tip of the iceberg, the report warns, because in many cases media houses or journalists are compelled to back down by the threat of litigation, before cases reach the courts.

In other cases, media houses “are so inundated with lawsuits that compiling information about each case would require resources that the target does not have access to.”