Global Courant 2023-05-18 23:05:40
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday sided with social media companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and ruled that they were exempt from lawsuits for allegedly aiding and abetting terrorist groups.
The case is about the ISIS/ISIS attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in 2017, which killed 39 people. The family of one of the victims, Nawras Alassaf, sued three social media companies under the 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act on the grounds that they “knowingly allowed ISIS and its supporters to use their platforms and ‘referral’ algorithms as means of recruiting, raising funds and raising funds.” It is propaganda.”
The family argued that the firms did not do enough to remove content from terrorist groups.
However, the top court unanimously ruled that the link between the defendants and Daesh/ISIS was “too remote”.
“The plaintiffs failed to claim that the defendants had deliberately provided any substantial assistance to, or otherwise knowingly participated in, the Reina attack – not to mention that the defendants had assisted IS so widely and systematically that they would hold ISIS responsible for every ISIS attack. Plaintiffs did not file a claim accordingly,” the court ruled in an opinion written by Judge Clarence Thomas.
“Bad actors like ISIS, like the accused, may be using platforms for illegal and sometimes gruesome purposes. But the same can be said for cell phones, e-mail or the internet in general,” Thomas added.
In a separate lawsuit, which included a lawsuit against Google over the 2015 Daesh/ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the top court ruled that the company and its YouTube subsidiary were protected by Section 230 of the Communications Ethics Act. avoided. Section 230 largely protects social media companies from lawsuits over content posted to websites by social media users.
The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a US citizen who died in the attacks, filed the lawsuit. The family claimed that Google was responsible for Gonzalez’s death because Google allegedly approved Daesh/ISIS videos for YouTube ads and recommended the videos to users.
The Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court for reconsideration, but in an unsigned three-page short ruling said the case had “little reasonable requests for assistance, if any,”.
The Ninth Circuit Court is now ordered to reconsider the case in light of the verdict regarding the Reina nightclub attack.
Taken together, the decisions mark major victories for the tech industry.
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