The US Supreme Court dealt with two legal cases related to terrorism, in which the defendants are Google and Twitter. Both cases were sealed last week.
Last week, the US Supreme Court decided to dismiss two lawsuits in which the search engine company Google and the social service Twitter were accused of sharing content related to terrorism. The decision is a significant victory for internet companies, whose business is based on the fact that they are not legally responsible for content downloaded by users.
The Supreme Court was the first to make a decision in the Twitter v. Taamneh case. The background was the terrorist attack that happened in Istanbul in 2017. The family of a man who died in a nightclub shooting carried out in the name of the terrorist organization ISIS accused Twitter of aiding a terrorist act, because the company’s service has published contents that encourage terrorism.
The Supreme Court unanimously decided to dismiss the charge. In practice, this means that the platform company cannot be sued for aiding terrorism, even if its service contains content that incites this.
In the resolution, the judge of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas wrote that defining aid to terrorism is not always easy, but failed attempts to remove terrorist content are not.
The case against Google was returned to a lower court
After the indictment against Twitter was dismissed, the Supreme Court ruled in this decision that it cannot make a decision in the legal case against Google. Thus, Gonzalez v. Google returned to the lower court.
In the Gonzalez v. Google case, the father of a woman who died in the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 accuses YouTube, owned by Google, of recommending videos of the extremist Islamic terrorist organization Isis. It is not believed that the prosecution will succeed in the new round. Last time, the lower court rejected the charge.
In its rulings, the Supreme Court did not specify the limits of Section 230 of the US Telecommunications Act. Section 230 protects companies providing internet services from liability for content that users publish on the services.
EFF, an organization promoting people’s digital rights, praised the Supreme Court’s decisions, which did not change or weaken the protection of Article 230.
– Article 230 remains a vital part of the architecture of the modern internet and it will continue to enable users to access online platforms, EFF’s director of civil rights David Greene told in your announcement (you will switch to another service).