The Supreme Court avoided a sweeping ruling on Thursday that would have unraveled long-held legal protections internet companies enjoy and that shield them from litigation relating to content posted by users online.
The justices, in a brief unsigned decision, did not address the legal question of whether liability protections enshrined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act safeguarded Big Tech companies against lawsuits brought under an anti-terrorism law.
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Justices did not make a determination on Section 230 in Gonzalez v. Google, a case surrounding allegations that YouTube was liable for recommending videos promoting violent militant Islam.
The court was able to sidestep the thorny legal question through a related case involving similar allegations against Twitter in Taamneh v. Twitter. In that case, the court ruled unanimously that such allegations against Big Tech companies could not be brought in the first place under a federal law called the Anti-Terrorism Act.
As a result, both lawsuits against Twitter and Google, the parent company of YouTube, will likely be dismissed without the need to address dicey Section 230 questions.
Litigation against Google accused the company of having some responsibility for the killing of Nohemi Gonzalez, a U.S. resident who was in Paris during the 2015 attacks carried out by the Islamic State terrorist group.
In Taamneh, Twitter was accused of aiding and abetting the spread of militant Islamist ideas in a way that contributed to the death of a Jordanian citizen who died in a terrorist attack.
Gonzalez was 23 when she was killed while dining in a restaurant during an ISIS attack. Her family said that YouTube’s algorithms helped spread the message of hate that influenced her killers. They claimed YouTube’s role went above and beyond the type of conduct Congress intended with the protections under Section 230.
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The Gonzalez case was pegged by legal analysts as a possible catalyst for drastically transforming the way the internet works, though the justices took a narrow approach instead. Staunch First Amendment defenders worried the decision could make companies more reluctant to host free speech on their platforms and harm smaller online businesses, such as newspapers or niche blogs, if Section 230 protections were dissolved.
But the decision in Gonzalez not to address Section 230 was largely due to the findings in Taamneh. In that case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the family’s “allegations are insufficient to establish that these defendants aided and abetted ISIS in carrying out the relevant attack.”
