With the European Union's top court ruling that Facebook may be ordered to remove illegal content globally, the social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the judgement set a "very troubling precedent".

"This is going to be something that I would imagine we and other services will be litigating and basically trying to get to clarity on what this means over a long period of time," he said on Thursday at an internal Q&A session with employees.

In a rare move, Zuckerberg live streamed the internal Q&A to the public. The decision to make the discussion public came after The Verge a few days ago published details of Zuckerberg answering queries of employees at two town hall meetings in July.

The ruling of the European Court of Justice on Thursday may have significant implications in expanding content takedowns from social media platforms.

The ruling came after a former Austrian politician sought an order to make Facebook remove a comment published by a user on that social network harmful to her reputation.

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Mme Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, who was a leader of Austria's Greens Party, wanted Facebook to block access to the content globally.

The ruling said that EU law does not preclude a host provider such as Facebook from being ordered to remove identical and, in certain circumstances, equivalent comments previously declared to be illegal. (IANS)