Lawsuits aiming to hold social media companies financially responsible for terrorist attacks, including one revolving around the death of a Cal State Long Beach student at the hands of terrorists in 2015, will be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The cases — which the Supreme Court on Monday, Oct. 3, announced it would take on — could provide historic tests of a federal law that generally makes internet companies exempt from liability for the material their users post.
The lawsuits, filed independently two years apart, mark the court’s first significant pushback on the broad immunity social media companies have enjoyed under a provision known as Section 230, part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 has become a target of Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, who say it lets left-leaning tech companies censor right-wing voices.
In the cases, relatives of people killed in terrorist attacks in France and Turkey had sued Google, Twitter and Facebook. They accused the companies of helping terrorists spread their message and radicalize new recruits. One of the cases was thrown out, mostly under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, while the other was allowed to proceed.
One of the cases involves Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen studying in Paris.
The Cal State Long Beach student and an El Monte resident was one of 130 people killed in Islamic State group attacks in November 2015 in Paris and the nearby suburb of Saint-Denis. The attackers struck cafes outside the French national stadium and inside the Bataclan theater.
Gonzalez died in an attack at La Belle Equipe bistro. She was the only American who died in the Paris attacks.
A senior majoring in industrial design, she was one of 17 Cal State Long Beach students attending Strate College of Design in Paris as part of a study abroad program.
Gonzalez’s family filed a lawsuit against Google, Facebook and Twitter in 2015, in the U.S. District Court in Northern California, accusing the three companies of allowing their social networks to be used “as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.”
The family argued that the social media giants aided ISIS and other groups by allowing them to use their channels to recruit members and coordinate attacks.
Two lower courts sided with Google and said the lawsuit should be dismissed. A federal appeals court, however, reversed a judge’s decision to throw out the case against Twitter — but did not rule specifically on Twitter’s claim of immunity under Section 230.
Courts have interpreted Section 230 as immunizing computer services when they are engaged in activities traditionally performed by publishers, such as deciding whether to display or edit third-party content. But Gonzalez’s family has said recommendations are a different matter.
“Whether Section 230 applies to these algorithm-generated recommendations is of enormous practical importance,” the family argued in the appeal. “Interactive computer services constantly direct such recommendations, in one form or another, at virtually every adult and child in the United States who uses social media.”
Google, though, has said that at the time of the attack, YouTube used a sidebar tool to queue up videos based on user inputs, including browsing history. The company has said the only alleged link between the Paris attacker and YouTube was that one attacker was an active user of the video-sharing service and once appeared in an ISIS propaganda video.
“This court should not lightly adopt a reading of section 230 that would threaten the basic organizational decisions of the modern internet,” Google argued.
A lawyer representing Nohemi Gonzalez’s father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, said this case is not about free speech but about creating communication conduits that allow ISIS and other terror groups to plan, coordinate and execute terror attacks. The lawsuit also accused Google’s AdSense program, part of which allows YouTube users to share in revenue from ads posted alongside heavily trafficked videos, of possibly resulting in Google making payments to ISIS.
The lawsuit cited an extensive report from the Brookings Institution showing the extent to which ISIS used Twitter to send its propaganda out to the world and to draw in people who may be vulnerable to radicalization. The report estimated that 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIS supporters through December 2014.
“ISIS has been able to exert an outsized impact on how the world perceives it, by disseminating images of graphic violence,” according to the 2015 Brookings report, “while using social media to attract new recruits and inspire lone actor attacks.”
Gonzalez’s death sent waves of sadness through the CSULB community.
“We miss her today and we’ll miss her forever,” CSULB President Jane Close Conoley said during her 2015 funeral at Calvary Chapel in Downey.
In 2017, the university’s design shop, which often served as the student’s second home, was dedicated in her name. Room 131 became the first classroom at the university to be named after a student.
The other case the court agreed to hear involves Jordanian citizen Nawras Alassaf. He died in the 2017 attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, where a gunman affiliated with the Islamic State killed 39 people.
Alassaf’s relatives sued Twitter, Google and Facebook for aiding terrorism, arguing that the platforms helped the Islamic State grow and did not go far enough in trying to curb terrorist activity on their platforms. A lower court let the case proceed.
In May 2020, the Supreme Court declined to address a similar case, turning down an appeal on whether Section 230 protected Facebook from a lawsuit brought by US citizens injured in terror attacks in Israel who accused the social network of promoting posts by the terrorist group Hamas.
The US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had ruled earlier that Section 230 barred the suit, but the chief judge of the court dissented, criticizing the extensive immunity courts have granted to internet companies and calling on Congress to amend the law.
In March, Justice Clarence Thomas urged the court to take up a case addressing “the proper scope of immunity” under the law in a concurrence.
“Assuming Congress does not step in to clarify Section 230’s scope,” he wrote, “we should do so in an appropriate case.”
Trump had also set his sights on Section 230, directing then-Attorney General Bill Barr to send a proposal to Congress for how to impose new requirements on how the companies manage their content policies. Although several legislative proposal were floated, no changes were made to the measure.
Barr had highlighted the case as one where courts have granted “virtually limitless immunity” to shield online platforms. The Justice Department reviewed Section 230 as part of its investigation into major online platforms like Google and Facebook, and held a workshop on the issue.
The court, which began its new term Monday, is expected to hear arguments in the cases this winter, with decisions coming out before the court recesses for the summer, usually in late June. The cases are Gonzalez v. Google, 21-1333 and Twitter v. Taamneh, 21-1496.
The Associated Press and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
