The Supreme Court declined to address the legal liability shield that protects tech platforms from being held responsible for their users’ posts, the court said in an unsigned opinion on Thursday.
The decision leaves in place, for now, a broad liability shield that protects companies like Twitter, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube from being held liable for their users’ speech on their platforms.
In the case, Gonzalez v. Google, the court said it would “decline to address the application” of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects platforms from their users’ speech and also allows the services to moderate or remove users’ posts. The court said it made that decision because the complaint “appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief.”
The Supreme Court said it would vacate and remand, or send back, the decision to the Ninth Circuit court to reconsider in light of its decision on a separate case, Twitter v. Taamneh.
In that case, the family of an American victim of a terrorist attack sought to hold Twitter accountable under anti-terrorism law for allegedly aiding and abetting the attack by failing to take enough action against terrorist content on its platform. In a decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court ruled that such a claim could not be brought under that statute.
“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 in the court’s unanimous opinion.
“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,” he added, referring to the nightclub where the terrorist attack took place.
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