Supreme Court Doesn’t Weigh In On Section 230 Questions, Rules For Twitter In Case Over Terrorist Group’s Posts

deadline.com:

The Supreme Court rejected an effort to hold Twitter and other platforms responsible for “aiding and abetting” terrorism because the extremist groups posted fund-raising and recruiting content on their platforms.

The judges, though, sidestepped a ruling on Section 230, the provision of a 1996 law that generally protects social media from liability over their moderation of third party content.

The family of a victim of a terrorist attack on an Instanbul nightclub sued Twitter and other platforms under a 2016 antiterrorism statute.

The law allows those injured by a terrorist act to sue anyone “who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism.” In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas (read it here), the court ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that the tech platforms provided assistance to ISIS. “As alleged by plaintiffs, defendants designed virtual platforms and knowingly failed to do ‘enough’ to remove ISIS-affiliated users and ISIS related content—out of hundreds of millions of users worldwide and an immense ocean of content—from their platforms,” Thomas wrote. “Yet, plaintiffs have failed to allege that defendants intentionally provided any substantial aid to the Reina attack or otherwise consciously participated in the Reina attack—much less that defendants so pervasively and systemically assisted ISIS as to render them liable for every ISIS attack.” The justices declined to rule on the applicability of Section 230 in a separate case, brought by the family of a victim of a 2015 ISIS attack in France against Google (read it here).