Tech giants can’t be sued by attack victims, rules US Supreme Court
This is a major victory for the Tech giants. Google, Facebook and Twitter cannot be…
Tech giants can’t be sued by attack victims, rules US Supreme Court
This is a major victory for the Tech giants. Google, Facebook and Twitter cannot be prosecuted by victims of attacks, the United States Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
The families of victims accused them of having helped the Islamic State group by relaying its propaganda. The high court, however, did not enter into the broader debate over the law that has protected them for a quarter of a century from lawsuits for the content they put online.
Two cases
In concrete terms, it ruled on two separate cases. In the first, the parents of a young American killed in the November 2015 attacks in Paris had filed a complaint against Google. They blamed Youtube’s parent company for supporting ISIS’s growth by suggesting its videos to certain users.
In the second, the relatives of a victim of an attack on an Istanbul nightclub on January 1, 2017, believed that Facebook, Twitter and Google could be considered “accomplices” in the attack. According to them, their efforts to remove content from the IS group had not been “vigorous” enough.
“Insufficient allegations”
“The fact that bad actors profit from these platforms is not enough to ensure that the defendants knowingly gave substantial aid and therefore aided these groups”, writes Judge Clarence Thomas in the unanimous judgment of the Court. “We conclude that the plaintiffs’ allegations are insufficient to establish that the defendants helped IS to carry out its attack,” he wrote.
Judging to have enough arguments without entering into the debate on “section 230”, the high court “declines” the examination of this law dating from 1996, seen as a pillar of the rise of the Internet. The text decrees that companies in the technology sector cannot be considered “publishers” and enjoy legal immunity for content posted on their platforms.
With AFP
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