The US Supreme Court left in place a broad liability shield for social media companies for content posted by users, insulating Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google LLC from claims that they provided assistance to Islamic State terrorists.
(Bloomberg) — The US Supreme Court left in place a broad liability shield for social media companies for content posted by users, insulating Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google LLC from claims that they provided assistance to Islamic State terrorists.
Acting in a case involving Google, the court refused to limit the immunity internet companies have enjoyed under a decades-old law known as Section 230. In a related case, the court tossed out a lawsuit that said social media companies bore responsibility under an anti-terrorism law for a 2017 shooting in an Istanbul nightclub.
The unanimous decisions together mark a triumph for social media platforms, assuaging fears that the tech industry might face a new deluge of lawsuits and remove speech across their platforms. At least for the time being, the outcome means it would take an act of Congress to broadly open social media companies to lawsuits over third-party content.
The ruling in the Istanbul case put new limits on lawsuits under the US Anti-Terrorism Act. The family of victim Nawras Alassaf claimed that three social media companies “aided and abetted” the Islamic State because they didn’t do enough to remove videos.
Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said any connection between the companies and the nightclub attack was “far removed.”
“The allegations plaintiffs make here are not the type of pervasive, systemic, and culpable assistance to a series of terrorist activities that could be described as aiding and abetting each terrorist act by ISIS,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas cast doubt on efforts to hold social media companies liable for algorithms that push content to users.
“The algorithms appear agnostic as to the nature of the content, matching any content (including ISIS’ content) with any user who is more likely to view that content,” he wrote. “The fact that these algorithms matched some ISIS content with some users thus does not convert defendants’ passive assistance into active abetting.”
Google Reassured
Google hailed the decisions. “Countless companies, scholars, content creators and civil society organizations who joined with us in this case will be reassured by this result,” Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said.
The Section 230 case involved Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old US citizen who was one of 130 people killed in attacks by the Islamic State group in Paris in November 2015. Her family said Alphabet Inc.’s Google, through its algorithm-driven YouTube recommendations, aided the assailants in violation of the Antiterrorism Act.
In an unsigned opinion, the court said that, because the allegations were “materially identical” to those in the Istanbul case, the justices didn’t need to consider the scope of Section 230 immunity.
“We therefore decline to address the application of Section 230 to a complaint that appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief,” the court said.
The ruling set aside a federal appeals court decision that had let the suit go forward. The justices left open the possibility that Gonzalez’s family could amend the lawsuit.
Tech companies and their allies said weakening Section 230 would have had disastrous effects, forcing social media platforms, search engines and online marketplaces to radically reconfigure their businesses to protect themselves. Critics of the industry called those worries overblown, saying internet companies need to bear more responsibility for the proliferation of dangerous hate speech and disinformation.
Enacted as part of a broader 1996 law, Section 230 is widely credited with helping the internet flourish, giving platforms assurance that they wouldn’t be at risk of lawsuits for things their users post.
But the provision has drawn criticism from both sides of the political aisle. Conservatives including former President Donald Trump complain Section 230 shields tech companies that censor right-wing voices, while many liberals say it lets platforms ignore hate speech and extremism.
The cases are Gonzalez v. Google, 21-1333, and Twitter v. Taamneh, 21-1496.
(Updates with more from Thomas opinion, Google reaction starting in seventh paragraph.)
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