Supreme Court weighs in protecting big tech with dangerous content liability shield

WASHINGTON (AP) – Islamic State militants killed American college student Nochemie Gonzalez as she sat with friends in a Parisian bistro in 2015, one of several Friday night attacks in the French capital that left 130 people dead.

Her family’s lawsuit, which alleges YouTube’s recommendations aided the recruitment of the Islamic State group, is the focus of intense scrutiny by the Supreme Court on Tuesday about how broadly the law, written in 1996, protects tech companies from liability. Known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law is credited with helping create the modern Internet.

A related case, brought to trial on Wednesday, involves the 2017 nightclub terror attack in Istanbul, Turkey, which killed 39 people and sparked a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.

The tech industry has been criticized by the left for not paying enough attention to removing harmful content from the Internet and by the right for censoring conservative speech. Now the Supreme Court is ready for the first time to take a serious look at online remedies.

A victory for the Gonzalez family could wreak havoc on the internet, say Google and its many allies. Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are among the companies warning that job, restaurant and product searches could be restricted if these social media platforms have to worry about being sued over recommendations. that they provide and what their users want.

“Section 230 supports many aspects of the open web,” said Neil Mohan, who was just named senior vice president and head of YouTube.

The Gonzalez family, supported in part by the Biden administration, argues that the industry-friendly interpretation of the law by lower courts makes it too difficult to hold big tech companies accountable. Critics say that without the prospect of prosecution, companies have no incentive to act responsibly.

They urge the court to say that companies can be held liable in some cases.

Beatriz Gonzalez, Nohemi’s mother, said she barely uses the internet but hopes the case will make it harder for extremist groups to access social media.

“I don’t know much about social media or ISIS organizations. I don’t know anything about politics. But I know that my daughter will not disappear just like that, ”Gonzalez said in an interview with The Associated. Press from her home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Her daughter was 23, attending California State University, Long Beach, and spent a semester in Paris studying industrial design. According to Gonzalez, her last communication with her mother was a casual conversation about money via Facebook two days before the attacks.

The legal arguments have nothing to do with what happened in Paris. Instead, they include a reading of the law passed “at the dawn of the dot-com era,” as Judge Clarence Thomas, a critic of broad legal immunity, wrote in 2020.

When the law was passed, AOL was used by 5 million people, as he recalled at a recent conference at the Harvard School of Government. Kennedy Tom Wheeler, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Tom Wheeler, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. According to Wheeler, today Facebook has 3 billion users.

The law was drafted in response to a state court ruling that an internet company could be held liable for posting one of its users on an online forum. The main purpose of the law was to “protect the ability of Internet platforms to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to encourage them to review and remove illegal or offensive content,” as its authors, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore. , and former Rep. Christopher Cox, R-California, wrote in a Supreme Court filing.

Groups supporting the Gonzalez family say the companies have not done enough to control content related to child sexual abuse, revenge porn and terrorism, especially in terms of curbing the recommendation of computer algorithms for this content to users. They also say the courts have read the law too broadly.

“Congress could never have foreseen, in passing Section 230, that the Internet would evolve the way it is and that it would be used by terrorists the way it did,” said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who wrote a brief report on on behalf of former national security officials.

Mohan said that YouTube can hide just about anything that violates the company’s policies, including violent and extremist content, from people. According to him, only 1 video out of 1,000 is verified by the company.

The recommendations were the focus of the Supreme Court case. Google and its backers argue that even a narrow family solution will have far-reaching implications.

“Recommendation algorithms are what find the needles in humanity’s biggest haystack,” wrote Kent Walker and other Google lawyers in their principal letter to the Supreme Court.

“If we repeal Section 230, it will break a lot of internet tools,” Walker said in an interview.

Some sites may remove a large amount of legitimate content with excessive caution. New powers and marginalized communities are likely to suffer such a heavy hand, said Daphne Keller of the Stanford Cyber ​​Policy Center, who has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in support of Google.

The judges’ own views on the matter are largely unknown, with the exception of Thomas’s.

In 2020, he suggested that limiting companies’ immunity would not break them.

“The removal of the wide-ranging immunity that the courts have read in Section 230 will not necessarily result in defendants being held liable for online misconduct. This will simply give plaintiffs the opportunity to put forward their claims first. Plaintiffs still have to prove the merits of their cases, and some claims will undoubtedly fail,” Thomas wrote.

The Gonzalez family allege that YouTube aided and abetted ISIS by recommending the group’s videos to viewers most likely to be interested in them, in violation of federal antiterrorism law.

But nothing in the lawsuit links the assailants who killed Gonzalez to the YouTube videos, and the lack of a link could make it hard to prove that the company did something wrong.

If the judges had avoided the difficult questions posed by this case, they could have focused on Wednesday’s arguments regarding the Istanbul attack. The only question is whether a claim can be brought under the Terrorism Act.

A decision for companies in a case where the allegations are very similar to those made by the Gonzalez family would also put an end to the lawsuit over the Paris attacks.