U.S. Supreme Court Decides on YouTube's Algorithm

February 20, 2023 -- In a major case to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, the nine justices will adjudicate the scope of Section 230, a part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that frees platforms from legal responsibility for content posted online by their users. A ruling that could expose internet companies to litigation from every direction.

The justices will hear arguments in an appeal by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old woman from California shot dead during a 2015 rampage by Islamist militants in Paris, of a lower court's ruling dismissing a lawsuit against YouTube's owner Google LLC seeking monetary damages, citing Section 230. Google and YouTube are part of Alphabet.

The family claimed that YouTube, through its computer algorithms, unlawfully recommended videos by the Islamic State militant group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, to certain users. A ruling against the company could create a "litigation minefield," Google told the justices in a brief. Such a decision could alter how the internet works, making it less useful, undermining free speech and hurting the economy, according to the company and its supporters. It could threaten services as varied as search engines, job listings, product reviews and displays of relevant news, songs, or entertainment, they added.

Section 230 guards "interactive computer services" by making sure they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information provided by users. Legal experts note that companies could employ other legal defenses if Section 230 protections are curbed.

Calls have come from across the ideological and political spectrum - including Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump - for a rethink of Section 230 to ensure that companies can be held accountable. Biden's administration urged the justices to revive the Gonzalez family's lawsuit.

Gonzalez, who had been studying in Paris, died when militants fired on a crowd at a bistro during the rampage that killed 130 people.

The 2016 lawsuit by her mother Beatriz Gonzalez, stepfather Jose Hernandez and other relatives accused YouTube of providing "material support" to Islamic State in part by recommending the group's videos to certain users based on algorithmic predictions about their interests. The recommendations helped spread Islamic State's message and recruit jihadist fighters, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was brought under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act, which lets Americans recover damages related to "an act of international terrorism." The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed it in 2021. The justices will hear the family's appeal of a lower court's decision largely based on immunity granted to social media companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. 

They will hear a related case involving Twitter Inc. on Wednesday.  American relatives of a Jordanian man named Nawras Alassaf slain in 2017 in an Istanbul nightclub shooting that killed 39 people - with Islamic State again claiming responsibility - accused Twitter in a lawsuit of aiding and abetting the group by failing to police the platform for its accounts or posts.  Twitter is appealing after a lower court allowed that lawsuit to proceed and found that the company refused to take "meaningful steps" to prevent Islamic State's use of the platform. 

Google has attracted support from various technology businesses, scholars, legislators, libertarians and rights groups worried that exposing platforms to liability would force them to remove content at even the hint of controversy, harming free speech. The company defended its practices. Without algorithmic sorting, it said, "YouTube would play every video ever posted in one infinite sequence - the world's worst TV channel."

 "This court should not undercut a central building block of the modern internet," Google told the justices in a filing. "Eroding Section 230's protection would create perverse incentives that could both increase removals of legal but controversial speech on some websites and lead other websites to close their eyes to harmful or even illegal content," it added.