The Supreme Court sides with the tech giants on the legal shield for content

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

The US Supreme Court on Thursday declined to review legal protections for internet publishers in a pair of cases that had raised fears that laws governing online platforms could be radically changed.

The two cases marked the first time that the highest court in the United States has ruled directly on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which secures online platforms from legal responsibility for the content posted by their users.

The judges’ unanimous decision is a significant victory for big tech companies like Meta, which owns Google, Twitter and Facebook, which have relied heavily on the protections afforded by Section 230. Silicon Valley has long seen the law as critical to business models of many Internet companies, allowing them to allow users to post freely on their sites without fear of liability, while providing legal protection in cases where they step in to moderate.

The debate over Section 230 has been politically tense. Great technology firms have faced a barrage of criticism in Washington, with Republicans saying they have used the law’s protections to “censor” right-wing voices and Democrats arguing Section 230 helped platforms evade accountability for failing to stopped the disinformation.

Tech groups have warned that watering down or removing these shields could force them to become more proactive in removing content, as they would be more exposed to legal liability if they allow potentially harmful material to remain on their sites.

The two cases arose from lawsuits brought by family members of victims who died in the ISIS attacks. they claimed Google AND Chirping he had assisted the terrorist group, which used the companies’ platforms to disseminate its content.

But the court ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to prove the companies were at fault. “The defendants’ mere creation of their own media platforms is no more guilty than the creation of email, cell phones or the Internet in general,” they wrote in the Twitter case decision, which was published alongside that in the related Google case. .

“Countless businesses, scholars, content creators and civil society organizations who have joined us in this case will be reassured by this outcome,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said in a statement. “We will continue our work to safeguard freedom of expression online, fight harmful content, and support businesses and creators who benefit from the Internet.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Twitter vs Taamneh, which follows a deadly ISIS attack on an Istanbul nightclub in 2017, relatives of a victim accused Twitter, Facebook and Google of knowingly helping the terrorist group by failing to stop its supporters from sharing their content using their sites.

In Gonzalez vs. Google, relatives of a 23-year-old American student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris accused Google of violating US anti-terrorism laws by hosting ISIS videos on its YouTube platform and recommending related content to users via algorithms. They argued that Section 230 was enacted before algorithms radically altered how online content is recommended and absorbed.

But the court disagreed with placing the blame on the algorithmic system, a win for online platforms that had warned that weakening algorithms could severely damage their ability to filter and route content across the Internet.

“[D]Defendants’ recommendation algorithms are simply part of the infrastructure through which all content on their platforms is filtered,” the judges wrote in their decision on Twitter. “Furthermore, the algorithms were presented as agnostic to the nature of the content .”

Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy