The Supreme Court of the United States confirmed Thursday that Google, Facebook and Twitter cannot be prosecuted by victims of attacks who accuse these sites of helping ISIS by spreading its propaganda.
The Supreme Court’s decision marks a major victory for the three tech giants.
The Supreme Court made its decision without entering into a broader debate about the law that has protected technology groups for a quarter of a century from lawsuits over the content they publish online.
The US Supreme Court ruled in two separate cases.
In the first case, the parents of a young American woman who was killed in the November 2015 attacks in Paris filed a complaint against Google, the parent company of YouTube, accusing it of supporting the spread of ISIS by suggesting its videos to some users.
In the second case, relatives of a victim of an attack on a nightclub in Istanbul on 1 January 2017 held that Facebook, Twitter and Google could be considered “complicit” in the attack, as their efforts to remove ISIS content were not “strong” enough.
“The fact that bad actors benefit from these platforms is not sufficient to confirm that the Defendants willfully provided substantial assistance and thereby assisted these organizations,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s unanimous ruling.
“We concluded that the complainants’ allegations were insufficient to establish that the defendants helped ISIS carry out its attack,” he wrote.
The Supreme Court considered that it had sufficient arguments, and did not enter into a debate on “Article 230” and “refused” to study this law, which dates back to 1996, and is seen as one of the pillars of the rise of the Internet.
The text notes that technology companies cannot be considered “publishers” and have legal immunity for content published on their platforms.
