By Mark Sherman -
The Associated Press
A group of gunmen belonging to the Islamic State terrorist group killed an American university student, Nohemi González, in 2015 when she was sitting with friends in a Paris cafe, in an attack in the French capital that caused 130 deaths.
His family alleges that recommendations from the social video network YouTube (owned by Google) helped the terrorist group recruit followers, and their lawsuit is at the center of a case that is being debated this Tuesday in the Supreme Court on the scope of a 1996 law that exempts technology companies from liability.
The rule, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, helped create the internet as we know it today.
This case could change her radically.
Reynaldo Gonzalez cried as he remembered his daughter in Downey, California, on December 4, 2015. Genaro Molina / AP
A related case, which will be debated on Wednesday, concerns a 2017 attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, which killed 39 people and led to another lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google.
The tech industry faces criticism from the left for not doing enough to remove harmful content from the web, and from the right for censoring, they say, conservative speech.
Now, the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, is preparing to take an in-depth look at legal protections on the internet.
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A victory for the González family could have huge consequences online, say Google and its many allies.
Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are some of the companies warning that job searches, restaurants and merchandise could be restricted if those social networks had to be responsible and worry about being sued for recommendations and comments from their users. users.
"Section 230 underpins many aspects of the open internet," said Neal Mohan, who has just been named head of YouTube.
González's family, backed in part by the Joe Biden administration, argues that pro-industry lower court interpretation of the law has made it difficult to hold big tech companies accountable.
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That is why he urges the court to determine that companies can be sued in some cases.
Beatriz González, Nohemi's mother, affirms that she barely uses the internet, but she hopes that the case will make it difficult for extremist groups to access social networks.
"I don't know much about social networks or the Islamic State. I don't know anything about politics. But what I do know is that my daughter is not going to disappear just like that," González said in an interview with The Associated Press news agency from his home in Roswell, New Mexico.
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His 23-year-old daughter was a senior at California State University, Long Beach, spending a semester in Paris studying industrial design.
Her last communication with her mother was a conversation on Facebook, two days before the attacks, González said.
The legal arguments have nothing to do with what happened in Paris.
Instead, they revolve around a law that was enacted “at the dawn of the dotcom era,” as Justice Clarence Thomas, a critic of tech companies' broad legal immunity, wrote in 2020.
When the law was passed, five million people were using AOL, then one of the leading providers of online services, Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recalled at a recent lecture at the Kennedy School of Government. from Harvard.
Today Facebook has 3 billion users, Wheeler said.
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The law was written in response to a state court decision that an internet company could be held responsible for a post by one of its users on an online forum.
The basic purpose of the law was "to protect the ability of Internet platforms to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to encourage them to filter and remove illegal or offensive content," wrote its authors, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. and former Republican Representative Christopher Cox, in a bill filed with the Supreme Court.
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Groups that support the González family say that companies have not done enough to control content related to child sexual abuse, revenge pornography and terrorism, especially in curbing the recommendation of such materials by consumers. computer algorithms.
They also say the courts have interpreted the law too broadly.
"When Congress passed section 230, they could not have foreseen that the Internet would develop the way it has and would be used by terrorists the way it has," said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official.
Mohan said that YouTube can stop people from watching almost anything that violates the company's rules, including violent and extremist content.
As he says, only one in every 1,000 videos passes the company's filters.
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The recommendations have become the focus of the case before the court.
Google and its supporters argue that even a family-friendly ruling would have far-reaching effects.
"Recommender algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity's greatest haystack," Kent Walker and other Google lawyers wrote in their brief to the court.
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"If we do away with Section 230, it would break a lot of the tools of the internet," Walker said in an interview.
Some sites may remove a lot of legitimate content in a display of excessive caution.
According to Daphne Keller of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which joined the American Civil Liberties Union in supporting Google, marginalized communities are most likely to suffer the consequences of that heavy hand.
The opinions of the judges themselves on this issue are unknown, except that of Thomas who, in 2020, suggested that limiting the immunity of companies would not impact them.
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"Reducing the broad immunity that courts have interpreted in Section 230 would not necessarily make defendants liable for online misconduct. It would simply give people the opportunity to bring their claims in the first place. Plaintiffs will have to prove their cases, and some lawsuits will no doubt fail," Thomas wrote.
The González family alleges that YouTube aided the Islamic State by recommending the group's videos to users most likely to be interested, which would violate the Anti-Terror Law.
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But nothing in the lawsuit links the attackers who killed González to YouTube videos, and the lack of connection could make it difficult to prove that the company did anything wrong.
If the judges avoid the difficult issues raised by the case, they could focus on Wednesday's arguments about the Istanbul bombing.
The only question is whether the lawsuit can go ahead under the Anti-Terror Law.
A ruling in favor of the companies in that case, in which the accusations are very similar to those of the González family, would also end the lawsuit over the Paris attacks.