Supreme Court sides with social media companies in suits by families of terror victims

Washington — The Supreme Court on Thursday sidestepped a ruling that could have limited the scope of a federal law that serves as a powerful shield for internet companies, delivering a victory for the platforms who have said the law, known as Section 230, has helped the internet flourish.

In an unsigned opinion in the case known as Gonzalez v. Google, the high court said it declined to address the application of the law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to a “complaint that appears to state little, if any plausible claim for relief.”

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student who was among the 129 people killed in Paris by ISIS terrorists in November 2015, against Google, which owns YouTube, in 2016. The Gonzalez family alleged the tech giant aided and abetted ISIS in violation of a federal anti-terrorism statute by recommending videos posted by the terror group to users.

The battle marked the first time the Supreme Court considered the scope of the Section 230, which protects internet companies from liability over content posted by third parties, and allows platforms to remove objectionable content.

In a second, similar case against Twitter, the court sided with the platform and other social media companies in a legal dispute brought by the family of a victim of a 2017 terrorist attack at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, finding that the plaintiff failed to state a claim under federal law.

The high court ruled unanimously in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh.

The families sought to hold Facebook, Twitter and Google liable for the terror attack, alleging the companies knew ISIS was using the platform but failed to stop them from doing so. But the high court said that the allegations “are insufficient to establish that these defendants aided and abetted ISIS in carrying out the relevant attack.”