WASHINGTON: Islamic State gunmen killed American college student Nohemi Gonzalez as she sat with friends in a Paris bistro in 2015, one of several attacks on a Friday night in the French capital that left 130 people dead. Her family’s lawsuit claiming YouTube’s recommendations helped the Islamic State terror group’s recruitment is at the centre of a closely watched Supreme Court case being argued on Tuesday about how broadly a law written in 1996 shields tech companies from liability.
The law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is credited with helping create today’s internet. It states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher” or hold responsibility for content that came from an outside party. A related case, set for arguments Wednesday, involves a terrorist attack at a club in Istanbul, Turkiye, in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a suit against Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
The tech industry is facing criticism from the left for not doing enough to remove harmful content from the internet and from the right for censoring conservative speech. Now, the court is poised to take its first hard look at online legal protections. A win for Gonzalez’s family could wreak havoc on the internet, say Google and its allies. Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are among the firms warning that searches for jobs, restaurants and merchandise could be restricted if those platforms had to worry about being sued over the recommendations they provide and their users want.
“Section 230 underpins a lot of aspects of the open internet,” said Neal Mohan, who was just named senior vice-president and head of YouTube. Gonzalez’s family argues that lower courts’ industry friendly interpretation of the law has made it too difficult to hold Big Tech companies accountable. Freed from the prospect of being sued, firms have no incentive to act responsibly, critics say. They are urging the court to say that firms can be sued in some instances. The legal arguments have nothing to do with what happened in Paris. Instead, they turn on the reading of a law. The law’s basic purpose was “to protect internet platforms’ ability to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to encourage them to screen and remove illegal or offensive content,” its authors wrote in a Supreme Court filing.
Groups supporting the Gonzalez family say companies have not done nearly enough to control content in the areas of child sexual abuse, revenge porn and terrorism, especially in curbing computer algorithms’ recommendation of that content to users. They also say that courts have read the law too broadly. Google and its supporters argue that even a narrow ruling for the family would have far-reaching effects. In the two hearings, the judges will listen to arguments brought by families of the victims of jihadi attacks who accuse Google and Twitter of having “helped” the perpetrators, IS, by publishing its propaganda.
The law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is credited with helping create today’s internet. It states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher” or hold responsibility for content that came from an outside party. A related case, set for arguments Wednesday, involves a terrorist attack at a club in Istanbul, Turkiye, in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a suit against Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
The tech industry is facing criticism from the left for not doing enough to remove harmful content from the internet and from the right for censoring conservative speech. Now, the court is poised to take its first hard look at online legal protections. A win for Gonzalez’s family could wreak havoc on the internet, say Google and its allies. Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are among the firms warning that searches for jobs, restaurants and merchandise could be restricted if those platforms had to worry about being sued over the recommendations they provide and their users want.
“Section 230 underpins a lot of aspects of the open internet,” said Neal Mohan, who was just named senior vice-president and head of YouTube. Gonzalez’s family argues that lower courts’ industry friendly interpretation of the law has made it too difficult to hold Big Tech companies accountable. Freed from the prospect of being sued, firms have no incentive to act responsibly, critics say. They are urging the court to say that firms can be sued in some instances. The legal arguments have nothing to do with what happened in Paris. Instead, they turn on the reading of a law. The law’s basic purpose was “to protect internet platforms’ ability to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to encourage them to screen and remove illegal or offensive content,” its authors wrote in a Supreme Court filing.
Groups supporting the Gonzalez family say companies have not done nearly enough to control content in the areas of child sexual abuse, revenge porn and terrorism, especially in curbing computer algorithms’ recommendation of that content to users. They also say that courts have read the law too broadly. Google and its supporters argue that even a narrow ruling for the family would have far-reaching effects. In the two hearings, the judges will listen to arguments brought by families of the victims of jihadi attacks who accuse Google and Twitter of having “helped” the perpetrators, IS, by publishing its propaganda.