The Supreme Court Battle for Section 230 Has Begun
upstart writes:
The future of recommendation algorithms could be at stake:
The first shots have been fired in a Supreme Court showdown over web platforms, terrorism, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Gonzales v. Google - one of two lawsuits that are likely to shape the future of the internet.
Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh are a pair of lawsuits blaming platforms for facilitating Islamic State attacks. The court's final ruling on these cases will determine web services' liability for hosting illegal activity, particularly if they promote it with algorithmic recommendations.
The Supreme Court took up both cases in October: one at the request of a family that's suing Google and the other as a preemptive defense filed by Twitter. They're two of the latest in a long string of suits alleging that websites are legally responsible for failing to remove terrorist propaganda. The vast majority of these suits have failed, often thanks to Section 230, which shields companies from liability for hosting illegal content. But the two petitions respond to a more mixed 2021 opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which threw out two terrorism-related suits but allowed a third to proceed.
Gonzalez v. Google claims Google knowingly hosted Islamic State propaganda that allegedly led to a 2015 attack in Paris, thus providing material support to an illegal terrorist group. But while the case is nominally about terrorist content, its core question is whether amplifying an illegal post makes companies responsible for it. In addition to simply not banning Islamic State videos, the plaintiffs - the estate of a woman who died in the attack - say that YouTube recommended these videos automatically to others, spreading them across the platform.
Google has asserted that it's protected by Section 230, but the plaintiffs argue that the law's boundaries are undecided. "[Section 230] does not contain specific language regarding recommendations, and does not provide a distinct legal standard governing recommendations," they said in yesterday's legal filing. They're asking the Supreme Court to find that some recommendation systems are a kind of direct publication - as well as some pieces of metadata, including hyperlinks generated for an uploaded video and notifications alerting people to that video. By extension, they hope that could make services liable for promoting it.
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