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Google argues that if the Supreme Court decides to limit the protections offered by Section 230, the internet could “devolve into a disorganized mess.”
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold two days of hearings on a pair of cases that directly challenge the scope of Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that establishes the ground rules for regulating online speech.
The cases will represent the first Supreme Court consideration of Section 230, and could lay the groundwork for a dramatic change in the way the internet is governed.
Both cases—Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh —involve the use of social media platforms by ISIS terrorists. The court will address whether social media services did enough to block terrorists from their platforms—and in particular whether YouTube and other services are protected under Section 230 for the algorithmic recommendation of content.
In short, they address whether Section 230 protects not content per se, but also recommendation engines that serve up content to users.
The Gonzalez case was filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a college student who died in a terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015. Her family asserts that YouTube algorithms pushed ISIS videos in its recommendation engine. Lawyers for the Gonzalez family have asserted that ISIS used YouTube videos as a recruiting tool. YouTube is a unit of
Alphabet
‘s Google arm.
The Twitter case, which covers similar issues, relates to litigation connected with a Jordanian citizen named Nawras Alassaf who died in an ISIS attack in Istanbul in 2017.
A ruling is expected in June.
While Google won the Gonzalez case at both the federal district and appeals court level, Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL) fears a reversal of the lower court decisions could cause huge disruptions in the basic functioning of the internet. Google laid out its worries on Thursday in both a blog post and in a related filing with the court.
In the filing, Google asserts that if the court decides to limit the protections offered by Section 230, there is the potential that “the internet would devolve into a disorganized mess and a litigation minefield.” The company says the result would encourage both “wide-ranging suppression of speech and the proliferation of more offensive speech.”
Google added: “Sites with the resources to take down objectionable content could become beholden to heckler’s vetoes, removing anything anyone found objectionable. Other sites, by contrast, could take the see-no-evil approach, disabling all filtering to avoid any inference of constructive knowledge of third-party content. Still other sites could vanish altogether.”
The company asserts that the court, by not extending 230 protections to algorithms, could inadvertently make the internet a useless mess.
“Without algorithmic sorting, Google Search would display an unordered, spam-filled list of every website,” the company said in the filing. “Gmail would not be able to deprioritize spam. YouTube would play every video ever posted in one infinite sequence—the world’s worst TV channel. Westlaw would display every judicial decision chronologically without headnotes.
Amazon
would intermingle jackets with knives and handbags with toothbrushes.”
The case has attracted widespread interest not only from the internet industry but across the political landscape. In an amicus brief, for instance, just over half the U.S. states—including both left-leaning states such as California and New York, and more conservative states such as Alaska and Alabama—jointly recommend the court rule against Google in the Gonzalez case.
“What was enacted as a narrow protection from defamation liability has become an all-purpose license to exploit and profit from harmful third-party conduct,” the states asserted in their brief filed late last year.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
