Supreme Court sides with Twitter, Google in high-risk cases on social media, terrorism

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A unanimous Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Google and Twitter in a pair of cases that alleged social media was responsible for terrorist attacks abroad.

Judge Clarence Thomas in an opinion for the Twitter case said the families of victims of a 2017 ISIS attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey failed to adequately prove that online platforms had “helped and abetted” terrorists in violation of federal law.

“The plaintiffs did not allege that the defendants intentionally provided any substantial assistance to the Reina attack or that they otherwise knowingly participated in the Reina attack, much less that the defendants assisted ISIS in such a pervasive and systematic manner as to render them responsible for every ISIS attack,” Thomas wrote. .

The court adopted similar reasoning in an unsigned per curiam opinion in the Google case, filed by the family of the only American killed in the 2015 Paris terror attacks perpetrated by ISIS extremists who had posted materials on Google’s YouTube video platform .

In both cases, the families of the victims said social media companies were indirectly complicit in the attacks by failing to remove extremist content from their platforms, which in turn may have facilitated radicalization and the recruitment of terrorists.

The federal counterterrorism law allows civil actions against anyone who “knowingly aids and abets by providing substantial assistance” to a terrorist in perpetrating an act of violence.

But Judge Thomas, in a bespoke ruling, said the standard had not been met.

“The fact that some offenders took advantage of these platforms is not sufficient to claim that the defendants knowingly provided substantial assistance and thereby aided and abetted the acts of those offenders,” he wrote.

The family of Noehmi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old California college student killed in the Paris attack, has also asked the court to waive the legal immunity Internet companies enjoy under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for published content from third-party users, such as messages, images and videos. But the court declined to address the scope of that landmark law, sidestepping the issue.

The decisions are a substantial victory for online companies who warned that broadening the scope of liability would disrupt the internet as we know it.

“No digital service wants its products to be used by bad actors, but trying to use liability here will actually backfire,” Matthew Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry, told ABC News earlier this year. Association.

When reached by ABC News, members of the Gonzalez family declined to comment on the outcome of the case.

Judge Thomas acknowledged that there could be situations where a social media company could be held liable for some role in a terrorist act, but said the alleged aid should be “more direct, active and substantive” than simply providing a space for groups to most messages and videos, as stated in these cases.

Some consumer advocates and tech reformers had hoped the Court would help reign in the power and influence of social media companies, but that task is now more directly in the hands of Congress.

“There is a political question here of how we can continue to allow these social media companies to operate. We don’t want them crippled by lawsuits, but we also need to crack down on some of the ways terrorist groups can facilitate their recruitment, Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent, attorney and former dean of Yale Law School, said on ABC News Live. “These companies are built to make money on ad revenue, and they make ad revenue by keeping people on their platforms and active. I think we need to change the incentives here to change the landscape.”