Global Courant 2023-05-19 00:16:27
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The associated press
Barbara Ortutay
Published on May 18, 2023 • read for 4 minutes
FILE – Reynaldo Gonzalez collapses at the memory of his daughter Nohemi Gonzalez, who died in the November Paris attacks, at her funeral at Calvary Chapel in Downey, California, December 4, 2015. The Supreme Court on Thursday, May 18, 2023, sidestepped a case against Google that may have allowed for more lawsuits against social media companies. The judges’ decision returns the case of Nohemi Gonzalez’s family to a lower court. The family wants to sue Google for YouTube videos they say helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them. Google owns YouTube. Photo by Genaro Molina /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Google, Twitter, Facebook and other tech companies fueled by social media have dodged a legal threat that could have punched a huge hole in their business models.
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The US Supreme Court on Thursday granted a stay by dismissing a lawsuit alleging that social media platforms should be held liable for enabling a deadly attack on a Turkish nightclub and referring another case back to a lower court.
Those moves, three months after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases, preserve a law known as Section 230 that protects social media services from being held responsible for the material posted on their platforms.
Without the protection of no more than 26 words tucked away in a broader U.S. telecommunications reform passed in 1996, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies probably couldn’t have grown as big as they are today. And their future prospects would deteriorate if their platforms lost their legal immunity.
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But just because the Supreme Court has sidestepped the thorny issue for now, doesn’t mean other cases won’t be brought that could lead to unfavorable decisions in the future. This year’s high-profile oral arguments on the matter also highlighted the widespread feeling that Congress should review a law that was passed before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was even a teenager.
“We really don’t know anything about these things. You know, these are not like the top nine experts on the internet,” Judge Elena Kagan said of herself and her colleagues at oral arguments in February, adding that the issue may be best addressed by US lawmakers.
WHAT IS SECTION 230?
If a news site falsely calls you a scammer, you can sue the publisher for libel. But if someone posts that to Facebook, you can’t sue the company – only the person who posted it.
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That’s thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that “No provider or user of any interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by any other provider of information content .”
That legal term protects companies that can host trillions of posts from being called into obscurity by anyone who feels aggrieved by something someone else posted — whether their complaint is legitimate or not.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have argued for a variety of reasons that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms have abused those protections and should lose their immunity — or at least earn it by complying with government demands.
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Section 230 also allows social platforms to moderate their services by removing posts that are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, for example, as long as they act in good faith.
WHERE DOES SECTION 230 COME FROM?
The measure’s history dates back to the 1950s, when bookstore owners were held liable for selling books containing “obscenity,” which is not protected by the First Amendment. One case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that holding someone accountable for someone else’s content had a “chilling effect”.
That meant plaintiffs had to prove that bookstore owners knew they were selling obscene books, said Jeff Kosseff, the author of “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet,” a book about Section 230.
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Fast-forward a few decades to when the commercial Internet took off with services like CompuServe and Prodigy. Both offered online forums, but CompuServe chose not to moderate it, while Prodigy, seeking a family-friendly image, did.
CompuServe was sued for that and the case was dismissed. However, Prodigy ran into trouble. The judge in their case ruled that “they exercised editorial control — so you’re more like a newspaper than a newsstand,” Kosseff said.
That didn’t sit well with politicians, who feared the outcome would discourage newly founding internet companies from moderating in the first place. And Section 230 was born.
“Today it protects against both user post liability and content moderation liability claims,” said Kosseff.
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WHAT HAPPENS IF SECTION 230 EXPIRES?
“The most important thing we do on the internet is talk to each other. It could be email, it could be social media, it could be bulletin boards, but we talk to each other. And many of those conversations are made possible by Section 230, which says whoever allows us to talk to each other is not liable for our conversations,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University who specializes in internet law. “The Supreme Court could easily distort or scrap that basic thesis and say that the people who let us talk to each other are liable for those conversations. At that point, they won’t let us talk to each other.”
There are two possible outcomes. Platforms may become more cautious, as Craigslist did after the passage of a sex trafficking law in 2018 that exempted Section 230 from material that “promotes or facilitates prostitution.” Craigslist quickly removed the “personals” section, which was not intended to facilitate sex work, altogether. But the company didn’t want to take any chances.
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“If platforms weren’t legally immune, they wouldn’t risk the legal liability that could arise from hosting the lies, slander and threats of Donald Trump,” said Kate Ruane, a former senior legislative adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union who now works for PEN America.
Another possibility: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms could ditch moderation altogether and let the lowest common denominator prevail.
Such unmonitored services could easily be dominated by trolls, such as 8chan, a site notorious for its graphic and extremist content.
Any amendment to Section 230 is likely to have ripple effects on online speech around the world.
“The rest of the world is cracking down on the internet even faster than the US,” Goldman said. “So we are one step behind the rest of the world when it comes to censoring the internet. And the question is whether we can keep it up on our own.”
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AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this story.
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