The US Supreme Court on Wednesday heard reasoning from Twitter, the US government and the family of a Jordanian citizen killed in a XNUMX terrorist attack, in a case that will decide whether the platform of social networks can be responsible for the actions of those who use their services.
Much of the hearing was devoted to a cautious analysis of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), the law under which the Tammneh family filed their lawsuit. His reasoning, essentially, is that Twitter is responsible for managing a platform for the terrorists who used it to communicate and plan the attack. Twitter, for its part, argued that it could not be held accountable without a demonstration that it had been informed of a specific attack and had done nothing about it.
The Tammneh hearing came the day after another hearing - Gonzalez v. Google, a case involving a similar issue as to whether a major technology platform can be held legally liable for bad actors who use its services for malicious purposes. But while the reasoning in this case focused largely on Section XNUMX of the Communications Decency Act, a law that gives Internet companies extensive immunity from liability for content generated by the users, Taamneh focused more on the JASTA law.
"Plaintiff's assertion that because Defendants normally knew that among their billions of users there were followers of the Islamic State who violated its policies and therefore Defendants should have done more to enforce these policies does not help and incite an act of international terrorism". he claimed that Twitter advises Seth Waxman, a WilmerHale associate and former US attorney general.
Judges incredulous before reasoning from Twitter
Some legal observers were surprised by the apparent skepticism with which certain justices treated Waxman's reasoning, given the way the issues were handled at the hearing the previous day.
"I thought Gonzalez's indication was that he was incredulous that JASTA would leave liability based on the general provision of services to millions of people across the globe, and hoped they would carry that skepticism into Taamneh's reasoning," said David Greene, Senior Counsel and Civil Liberties Officer at Electronic Frontera Base.
The potential effects of a ruling against Twitter are enormous, Greene noted, but would largely depend on the precise nature of the court's ruling. This would drastically affect Section XNUMX, an essential backbone of the Internet, and a particularly sweeping new liability standard could lead to immediate and tragic changes in the way platforms like Twitter and Google operate.
One of the primary effects, if the court waters down some of the Section XNUMX protections, could be a notice and takedown system, similar to that used for online copyright infringement, he said. More than one judge, he said, has an apparent interest in reviving the idea of "distributor liability" for Internet companies.
"And that would cause a lot of things to be removed very quickly," Greene said.
Rulings in the Twitter and Google cases are expected this summer.
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