Author Topic: Justices will consider whether tech giants can be sued for allegedly aiding ISIS terrorism  (Read 227 times)

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SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 2/19/2023

In 2015, ISIS conducted a series of coordinated attacks around Paris that killed 130 people and wounded nearly 500 more. Two years later, 39 people were killed in an ISIS attack on an Istanbul nightclub during the early hours of New Year’s Day. This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases arising from the attacks. The justices’ decisions in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh could reshape legal liability for some of the nation’s largest technology companies.

Gonzalez v. Google

The question at the center of Gonzalez, which will be argued on Tuesday, is the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which generally shields tech companies from liability for content published by others. The justices will consider whether that landmark statute protects internet platforms when their algorithms target users and recommend someone else’s content.

The question comes to the court in a lawsuit filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American woman who was killed in the 2015 ISIS attack on a Parisian bistro, La Belle Équipe. They brought their lawsuit under the Antiterrorism Act, arguing that Google (which owns YouTube) aided ISIS’s recruitment by allowing ISIS to post videos on YouTube that incited violence and sought to recruit potential ISIS members, and by recommending ISIS videos to users through its algorithms.

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that Section 230 protects such recommendations, at least if the provider’s algorithm treated content on its website similarly. The majority acknowledged that Section 230 “shelters more activity than Congress envisioned it would.” However, the majority concluded, Congress – rather than the courts – should clarify how broadly Section 230 applies. The Gonzalez family then went to the Supreme Court, which agreed last year to weigh in.

In the Supreme Court, the Gonzalez family insists that recommendations are not always shielded from liability under Section 230. Whether they are protected, the family says, hinges on whether the defendant can meet all of the criteria outlined in Section 230, which bars providers of “an interactive computer service” from being “treated as the publisher … of any information provided by” a third party. For example, the family argues, Section 230 does not protect a defendant from liability for recommendations that contain material that the defendant itself created or provided, such as URLs for the user to download or “notifications of new postings the defendant hopes the user will find interesting,” because in that scenario, the information would not be provided by someone else. 

A website like YouTube is also not shielded from liability, the family continues, when it provides unsolicited recommendations that it thinks will appeal to users. In that scenario, the family asserts, the defendant is not providing access to a computer server (because the user is not making a request) and therefore is not acting as a “provider … of an interactive computer service.”

Because Section 230 does not always provide tech companies with immunity for their recommendations, the family concludes, the 9th Circuit should not have thrown out the family’s claim. But, the family stresses, even if Google is not entitled to immunity under Section 230, that is only the beginning of the inquiry: The family must then show that Google can be held liable under federal antiterror laws for its recommendations.

More: https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/02/justices-will-consider-whether-tech-giants-can-be-sued-for-allegedly-aiding-isis-terrorism/