Palantir loses legal challenge to force Swiss magazine to publish rejoinders

Data analytics company loses on 22 out of 23 counts in lawsuit disputing how Swiss government rejected firm’s services

The US technology company Palantir has lost a legal challenge to force a Swiss independent magazine to publish its responses to articles about how the Swiss government rejected the firm’s services.

The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the firm and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.

The one-year investigation published in December – conducted by Republik and the Swiss research collective WAV – was one of the first to tell a story about Palantir that was a “failure narrative”, the journalists involved in the investigation said.

Over the course of a year, they filed dozens of FOIs and found out that the spy-tech firm, though it had been in Switzerland for nearly four years, had not managed to win any government contracts.

It was this narrative – that Palantir could not sell its products to Switzerland – that prompted the legal action, the journalists said.

The articles had made waves in Europe and the UK, prompting British MPs and officials in other governments to question whether its technology was necessary for them, although Palantir has said the Swiss government was not a significant target for its regional business growth.

The journalists said they had interviewed company executives and sent a full list of questions before publication, but that the company demanded they print a detailed rebuttal with a list of points that the journalists said went beyond the scope of their investigation. When the magazine refused, Palantir filed a lawsuit in a Swiss commercial court demanding that it did so. While Swiss media law allows the subjects of a story to request a right of reply, this has caveats: the right of reply has to be concise and stick to the facts of the story.

The court on Friday ordered Palantir to bear 95% of the SFr9,000 ($11,000) court costs and to pay Republik SFr9,900 in legal expenses.

Neither Republik nor WAV are large outlets; the court case took up a significant portion of their resources.

Jennifer Steiner, co-founder of WAV and one of the investigators, said: “It was a lot of work and time invested. After four months waiting for a verdict, it’s good to have such a ruling now.”

Balz Oertli, a journalist with WAV research collective, said: “We invested a great deal of effort into this case, and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

The sole exception in the case concerned a statement in Republik’s article, “Why Palantir is becoming a risk for Switzerland”, reporting that Palantir’s Foundry software platform had originally been developed for US counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The court ordered Republik to publish a short counterstatement from the company disputing that claim.

Palantir said in a statement reported by the Financial Times: “We welcome that the Zurich commercial court confirmed our right to publish a counterstatement. It’s a critical part of open debate in our society to hear both sides on important topics.”