WASHINGTON (AP) — Islamic State gunmen killed American college student Nohemi Gonzalez as she sat with friends in a Paris bistro in 2015, one of several attacks Friday night in the capital of France that killed 130 people.
His family’s lawsuit that claims YouTube recommendations helped recruit the Islamic State group is at the center of a closely watched Supreme Court case Tuesday arguing over how broad a law should be. written in 1996 protects technology companies from liability. The law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is credited with helping create today’s internet.
A related case, set for arguments Wednesday, involves a terrorist attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a lawsuit against of Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
The tech industry has faced 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 high court is poised to take its first hard look at online legal protections.
A victory for Gonzalez’s family could hurt the internet, say Google and many of its allies. Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are among the companies that warn that the search for jobs, restaurants and sales could be restricted if the social media platforms have to worry about the recommendations they give and like. to their users.
“Section 230 underpins many aspects of the open internet,” said Neal Mohan, who was recently named senior vice president and head of YouTube.
Gonzalez’s family, partially backed by the Biden administration, argued that the lower court’s industry-friendly interpretation of the law made it too difficult to hold Big Tech companies accountable. Freed from the possibility of being sued, companies have no incentive to act responsibly, critics say.
They urged the court to say that the companies could be sued in some instances.
Beatriz Gonzalez, Nohemi’s mother, said she hardly uses the internet, but hopes the case will result in making it harder for extremist groups to access social media.
“I don’t know much about social media or these ISIS organizations. I don’t know politics. But what I know is that my daughter is not going to vanish just like that,” said Gonzalez in an interview with The Associated Press from his home in Roswell, New Mexico.
His daughter is a 23-year-old senior at California State University, Long Beach, who is spending a semester in Paris studying industrial design. His last communication with his mother was a mundane exchange about money via Facebook, two days before the attacks, Gonzalez said.
The legal arguments have nothing to do with what happened in Paris. Instead, they are re-reading a law enacted “at the dawn of the dot-com era,” as Justice Clarence Thomas, a critic of broad legal immunity, wrote in 2020.
When the law was passed, 5 million people used AOL, then a leading online service provider, Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recalled at a recent conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Facebook has 3 billion users today, Wheeler said.
The law was created in response to a state court decision that held an internet company liable for a post by one of its users on an online forum. The basic purpose of the law is “to protect the ability of Internet platforms to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to encourage them to screen and remove illegal or harmful content,” its authors, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. , and former Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., wrote the filing to the Supreme Court.
The groups that support the Gonzalez family say that the companies have not done enough to control the content of the parts of sexual abuse of children, revenge pornography and terrorism, especially to prevent the recommendation of computer algorithms on that users content. They also say the courts are reading the law too broadly.
“Congress never anticipated when it passed Section 230 that the internet would develop in the ways it has and that it would be used by terrorists in the ways it has,” said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who wrote a brief for former national security officials.
Mohan said YouTube can prevent people from watching almost anything that violates the company’s rules, including violent, extremist content. Only one video out of 1,000 made it past the company’s screeners, he said.
Recommendations emerged that focused on the Supreme Court case. Google and its supporters argue that even a narrow decision for the family will have far-reaching effects.
“Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s biggest haystack,” wrote Kent Walker and other Google lawyers in their lead brief to the Supreme Court.
“If we repeal Section 230, that will destroy a lot of things on the internet,” Walker said in an interview.
Some sites may remove a lot of legitimate content out of an abundance of caution. Emerging forces and marginalized communities are likely to suffer from such a heavy hand, said Daphne Keller of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, who joined the American Civil Liberties Union in supporting Google. .
The judges’ own views on the issue are largely unknown, except for Thomas.
He suggested in 2020 that limiting the immunity of companies would not destroy them.
“Repealing the sweeping immunity courts read in Section 230 does not necessarily make defendants liable for online misconduct. It merely gives plaintiffs an opportunity to raise their claims in the first place. It should plaintiffs will still have to prove the merits of their cases, and some claims will undoubtedly fail,” Thomas wrote.
The Gonzalez family alleges that YouTube has aided and abetted IS by recommending the group’s videos to viewers who might be interested in them, in violation of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act.
But nothing in the suit links the attackers who killed Gonzalez to the YouTube videos, and the lack of connection makes it difficult to prove the company did anything wrong.
If the judges avoid difficult questions posed by the case, they may focus on Wednesday’s arguments involving the Istanbul attack. The only issue is whether the case can be pursued under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
A verdict for the companies in that case, where the allegations are very similar to those made by the Gonzalez family, would also end the lawsuit over the Paris attacks.
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