The US Supreme Court is hearing its first case on Tuesday over a federal law that is said to have helped create the modern internet by protecting Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies from lawsuits over text posted by third parties on their sites.
The judges will hear arguments about whether the family of an American college student killed in a Paris terror attack can sue Google for helping extremists spread their message and attract people.
It is the first time that the high court examines Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -of 1996, at the beginning of the internet age-, which protects companies from lawsuits for information published by their users.
Lower courts have interpreted the law as protecting the industry, which the companies and their supporters say has fueled the meteoric growth of the internet and encouraged the removal of harmful content.
But critics say the companies haven’t taken enough action and the law shouldn’t block lawsuits over recommendations, generated by computer algorithms, that direct users to more material that interests them and keeps them online longer.
The reduction of immunity would have drastic consequences that would affect the entire internet because the sites use algorithms to sort and filter mountains of data.
“Recommendation algorithms make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s biggest haystack,” the lawyers wrote in their document to the Supreme Court.
In response, lawyers for the victim’s family questioned the prediction of dire consequences. “It cannot be denied,” they wrote, “that materials promoted on social media have caused serious harm.”
The lawsuit was filed by the family of Nohemí González, a 23-year-old student at Cal State Long Beach who was spending a semester in Paris studying industrial design. She was killed by Islamic State gunmen in a series of attacks that left 130 people dead in November 2015.
The González family alleges that YouTube, a Google company, was complicit in the Islamic State by recommending their videos to users who would be most interested in them, thus violating the Anti-Terrorism Law.
Lower courts ruled in favor of Google.
Another related case, due to be filed on Wednesday, concerns a 2017 terrorist attack on a nightclub in Istanbul that killed 39 people and led to a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google.
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