Supreme Court: Lazy Content-Moderation Doesn't Mean Platforms Aided Terrorists
Clumsy or even careless content moderation is no crime, the Supreme Court held in a unanimous opinion posted Thursday—the latest in a long line of court rulings to uphold Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
That 1996 statute says online forums generally aren't liable for the content their users post—the users are—and can police their spaces as aggressively as they want without becoming responsible for what shows up there.
Thursday’s case, Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, could have cut a large hole in “CDA 230” protections. It alleged that by not evicting the ISIS terrorist cult and then automatically recommending its content, Twitter, Facebook, and Google provided material help that led to an ISIS follower murdering 39 people(Opens in a new window) on Jan. 1, 2017, at an Istanbul nightclub called Reina. Under the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act(Opens in a new window), such assistance—if established—would open those platforms to lawsuits for damages from victims.
As Justice Clarence Thomas writes in the court’s opinion (PDF(Opens in a new window)): “The key question, therefore, is whether defendants gave such knowing and substantial assistance to ISIS that they culpably participated in the Reina attack.”
The court’s answer: No, that didn’t happen under any reasonable understanding of what it means to “aid and abet” a criminal act or enterprise.
“Yet, there are no allegations that defendants treated ISIS any differently from anyone else,” Thomas writes. “Rather, defendants’ relationship with ISIS and its supporters appears to have been the same as their relationship with their billion-plus other users: arm’s length, passive, and largely indifferent.”
And that includes any automated recommendation or
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