U.S. Supreme Court sided with Google and Twitter in aiding terrorism lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a lawsuit against Google And Twitter, refusing to acknowledge the responsibility of social networks for the actions of terrorist groups that post their content on these social networks. According to the court, the appearance of such content on the YouTube and Twitter platforms does not entail direct legal liability for the platforms for committing specific terrorist attacks.

The first lawsuit, Twitter against Taamneh, was filed by relatives of Nawraz Alassaf, a Jordanian who died in 2017 in Istanbul as a result of a terrorist attack carried out by militants of the Islamic State (IS, a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation). The plaintiffs argued that the social networks, in this case Twitter, deliberately helped ISIS by not removing terrorist content that violated federal anti-terrorism laws from its platform, thereby allowing them to lead the case to a terrorist attack.

In his decision, Judge Clarence Thomas noted that the facts provided by the plaintiffs “are not sufficient to prove that these defendants helped and incited ISIS” to carry out the said attack. “If the accusation of aiding and abetting is taken too broadly, then ordinary merchants can become guilty of any illegal use of their goods and services, no matter how small their ties to the offender,” the judge said. According to him, then it is already possible to lay on the people delivering the mail, the responsibility for the content of the letters that they deliver.

The second claim was filed in relation to Google, the father of Noemi Gonzalez, who died in November 2015 in Paris, also as a result of an ISIS attack. Mr. Gonzalez also accused Google and other IT companies of allowing members of the Islamic State (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) to spread extremist ideas on social networks, as well as recruit new supporters and receive funding.

According to the plaintiff, Google is responsible for the fact that YouTube’s algorithms, developed by employees of the company, issued “Islamic State” videos to users in the recommendation lists, which is contrary to US laws on combating aiding terrorists. In this case, the court did not issue a full separate decision, citing the fact that the circumstances of the case are “virtually identical” to those appearing in the Twitter case. The Court returned the case to a lower court with a recommendation that it be retried in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Twitter.

Alena Miklashevskaya