The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously on two cases that could have stripped internet companies of legal-liability shields that protect them from third-party posts on social media. The decisions touched on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which grants companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google and Facebook parent Met Platforms Inc.
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broad legal protections.
In the first case, Twitter v. Taamneh, plaintiffs claimed the microblogging company was liable for allegedly “aiding and abetting” an attack in Istanbul by Islamic State because Twitter failed to adequately block or remove content promoting terrorism. Twitter said it had no specific knowledge that any particular post furthered a terrorist act. See also: The Supreme Court and algorithms: Is the internet at risk? The nation’s highest court held that hosting, displaying and recommending videos is not aiding and abetting terrorism. It added that all content is sorted by algorithms and that using content-agnostic recommendation algorithms is insufficient to create liability. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has repeatedly criticized Section 230 in past opinions and argued that the court should review the statute, authored the court’s unanimous opinion in Taamneh. “It might be that bad actors like ISIS are able to use platforms like defendants’ for illegal — and sometimes terrible — ends,” Thomas wrote. “But the same could be said of cell phones, email or the internet generally.” In the second case, Gonzalez v. Google, the family of a woman killed in Paris during a terrorist attack in November 2015 argued that YouTube used algorithms t …
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