The Supreme Court has made two limited decisions that determine the major tech companies are not responsible for the harms caused by user-generated content, but Section 230 still remains in place.
In two hotly contested decisions issued on Thursday, the United States Supreme Court determined that both Twitter and Google couldn't have to be held accountable for hosting material uploaded by terrorist organizations under anti-terrorism statutes. The choice was hailed as a triumph for the tech industry.
Clarence Thomas, who was writing on behalf of unanimous court in Twitter. Taamneh, stated that the main plaintiffs in the initial case, the family member of a Jordanian citizen who died during a terrorist act, had failed to raise a claim on which relief may be provided. According to him, the anti-terrorism legislation under which they brought their lawsuit against Twitter did not allow for responsibility in a situation in which Twitter had only given ISIS a platform, per se.
Thomas said that plaintiffs have failed to claim that defendants deliberately provided any major support for the Reina strike or otherwise intentionally engaged in the attack and much less that the defendants so extensively and strategically aided ISIS as that it renders them responsible for all ISIS attacks.
The Justice in opposition to sponsors of the Terrorism Act, the anti-terrorism law in the Twitter case, was the sole focus of the ruling while Section 230, the telecommunications law which forbids liability against technology platform providers like Twitter and Facebook for the content that they host, was left out of the discussion.
Furthermore, no Section 230 issues were covered in the court's brief, unsigned conclusion in Gonzalez versus Google. That ruling essentially said that the logic of the Twitter issue was sufficiently similar to both the two cases to apply to each, with the same outcome. In that situation, it was unclear if Google might be held accountable for hosting YouTube videos with terrorism-related content.
The court stated that they find it adequate to concede that much, even if not all, of plaintiffs' lawsuit appears to fail within either the decisions they reached in Twitter or the Ninth Circuit's uncontested holdings below. Therefore they decline to deal with the request for using Section 230 in a complaint which appears to present little, if any, reasonable claims for relief.
Tech businesses have expressed concerns that any reducing of Section 230's protections would effectively put an end to social media, causing Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to cease operations due to fear of getting sued over the content hosted on their systems or forcing them to give up moderation altogether. The decisions rule out, at least for the time being, the likelihood of a Supreme Court decision that would alter the law on hosting content liability.