Explained | What are the two lawsuits in the U.S. Supreme Court which could change the internet as we know it?

Multiple tech companies including Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit have urged SCOTUS not to alter the law that protects them from liabilities and a potential barrage of lawsuits

The story so far: This week, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) began hearing two pivotal lawsuits that will for the first time ask it to interpret Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996, the law that has shielded tech companies from liabilities over decades and essentially shaped the internet as we know it. The lawsuits pose a long-standing question, asked since the nascent days of the internet— should digital companies be held liable for the contest that users post on their platforms?

Both lawsuits have been brought by families of those killed in Islamic State (ISIS) terror attacks. The first lawsuit, Gonzalez vs. Google, has been filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American killed while studying in Paris, in the ISIS terror attacks of 2015 that killed 129 people. The family is suing YouTube-parent Google for “affirmatively recommending ISIS videos to users” through its recommendations algorithm. The Court filings say that the video-sharing platform YouTube “aided and abetted” the Islamic State in carrying out acts actionable under U.S. anti-terrorism law.

In their filing, the family of late Ms. Gonzalez said: “The defendants (Google) are alleged to have recommended that users view inflammatory videos created by ISIS, videos which played a key role in recruiting fighters to join ISIS in its subjugation of a large area of the Middle East, and to commit terrorist acts in their home countries.”

The first hearing in this case took place on Tuesday, February 21. Before approaching the Supreme Court, the petitioners had sued Google, and others including Twitter and Facebook in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Twitter and Google were later removed from the case and Google denied that it helped spread extremist messages. In 2021, the Ninth Circuit Court dismissed the claim, saying that Google was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, prompting the family to move the top court.

The second case, Twitter v. Taamneh, heard by SCOTUS for the first time on Wednesday, pertains to a lawsuit filed by the family of a Jordanian citizen killed in an ISIS attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2017. The lawsuit relies on the Antiterrorism Act, which allows U.S. nationals to sue anyone who “aids and abets” international terrorism “by knowingly providing substantial assistance.” The family argues that despite knowing that their platforms played an important role in ISIS’s terrorism efforts, Twitter and the other tech companies failed to take action to keep ISIS content off those platforms. It also says that the platforms assisted the growth of IS by recommending extremist content through their algorithms.

If a news website site falsely calls someone a con artist, they can file a libel suit against the publisher. However, with Section 230 of the U.S Communications Decency Act in place, if a person posts on Facebook that the said individual is a fraud, they cannot sue the platform, but only the person who posted it. It is essentially a “safe harbour” or “liability shield” for social media platforms or any website on the internet that hosts user-generated content, such as Reddit, Wikipedia, or Yelp.

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”— these words, enshrined in Section 230, have been described by a recent book and by Lisa Blatt, Google’s lawyer in the Gonzalez case, as the “26 words that created the internet”.