At least for now, the Supreme Court has decided not to interfere with Section 230, a key legal provision that protects internet companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook from liability for their users’ posts.
In February, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, in which families of victims of terrorist attacks sued the social media platforms for displaying IS-related content to some users. Ahead of those hearings, there were fears that the court could use the cases as leverage to modify Article 230 protections.
But the tone of the argument at the time led observers to conclude that while some members of the court would like to change the law, these cases were not right to do so.
“We really don’t know about these things,” Justice Elena Kagan said during the hearing. “You know, these aren’t like the nine greatest experts on the Internet.”
In an unsigned three-page opinion released Thursday, the court declined to address the application of Article 230 to those cases, leaving the law in place and unchanged. The court wrote that the Gonzalez case, in particular, “seems to present an unlikely claim for mitigation.”
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The opinion does not include any direct comment on the provisions of section 230, which was enacted as 1996.
The Gonzalez case was brought by the family of Nohemy Gonzalez, a college student who died in the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Her family claims that YouTube’s algorithms placed Isis videos in its recommendation engine. Lawyers for the Gonzalez family said Islamic State used videos from YouTube, a unit of Alphabet’s Google, as a recruitment tool.
The Twitter case, which involves similar issues, concerns the trial of Nouras Alsaf, a Jordanian national who died in a 2017 IS attack in Istanbul.
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The ruling, which was widely expected after hearings in which many judges expressed doubts about the claims, has little effect on stock prices.
Shares of Alphabet ( ticker: GOOGL ) were up 1.3% late in the morning at $122.38, while Meta Platforms ( META ) was down $242.32.
Email Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
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