Google warns Supreme Court of ‘litigation minefield’ if Big Tech legal protections are upended

Lawyers for Google warned the Supreme Court this week against upending federal law that shields Big Tech companies from legal liability, saying the move could create a “litigation minefield.”

The tech giant was sued by relatives of a victim of a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. The family argued that oogle allowed YouTube, which it operates, to promote certain content and videos to the Islamic State, or ISIS, in order to help recruit terrorists.

The family is asking the justices to upend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has protected social media companies from civil liability, considering the platforms conduits rather than actual speakers.

But the tech giant says that would create a legal and technological mess.

“If plaintiffs could evade Section 230(c)(1) by targeting how websites sort content or trying to hold users liable for liking or sharing articles, the internet would devolve into a disorganized mess and a litigation minefield,” attorneys for Google told the high court in their filing on Thursday.

The dispute is one of two cases, the other against Twitter, that the court will hear in February.

Both go to the heart of whether federal law shields YouTube, Twitter and other internet companies from liability over the way they promote content to their users.

The two cases involve families of victims of terrorist attacks, who say the tech giants should be held responsible for fueling the rise of ISIS.

The Twitter case argues that the tech companies don’t do enough to police what’s posted on their sites, while the Google dispute directly challenges the algorithms that social media companies use to recommend more content to their users.

The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen who was studying abroad in Paris in 2015 when she was gunned down in an ISIS terrorist attack, brought the lawsuit against Google.

Her family says the company aided and abetted ISIS by allowing the terrorist group to post radical videos and recruitment tools.

Although the lower court found Google not liable under Section 230, the same panel had considered the defendants — Google, Twitter and Facebook — liable in a separate action under federal anti-terrorism statutes, saying they aided and abetted international terrorism.

The Twitter lawsuit was brought by U.S. relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian citizen who was shot and killed at a nightclub in Istanbul in 2017, in an attack claimed by ISIS.

That lawsuit focuses on the Anti-Terrorism Act, with the plaintiffs arguing that tech companies can be held liable for “aiding and abetting” ISIS by not doing more to take down its content.

Neither lawsuit alleges the tech companies were directly involved in the attacks.

A key question in the Google case the justices have agreed to hear is how the algorithm is used to determine how content is promoted.

“Those algorithms are central to the modern concept of social media, and a ruling against Google could force major changes on the industry,” Google argued in its high court filing. “Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s largest haystack. The result of these algorithms is unprecedented access to knowledge, from the lifesaving (‘how to perform CPR’) to the mundane (‘best pizza near me’).”