Twitter was accused on Wednesday of ignoring the online actions of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) during a hearing in the United States Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction to decide whether the social network could be sued for complicity in terrorism.
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“Here is an allegation of willful blindness… You knew ISIS was using your platform,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in an interview with the social network’s attorney.
The nine judges of the instance took up a complaint filed by relatives of a victim of an IS attack in an Istanbul nightclub in 2017.
According to the family, Twitter is complicit in this act of terrorism because it failed to remove tweets from the group or stop recommending those tweets (via automated algorithms).
For its part, the platform, supported by its competitors (Google, Facebook, etc.), assures that the fact that it is a service used by tens of millions of people around the world is not proof that it is linked to terrorist groups “knowingly helps”.
A hearing was held on Tuesday on a similar issue: the family of a victim of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks accuses YouTube (a subsidiary of Google) of supporting the growth of ISIS by suggesting videos of the group to some users.
At the heart of both complaints is Section 230, a 1996 law that grants digital companies legal immunity to content uploaded by internet users to their platforms.
The industry’s big players vigorously defend that status of host—rather than publisher—which they believe enabled the birth of the Internet in its form.
Supreme Court justices on Tuesday expressed doubts about Section 230’s relevance today, but also their reluctance to influence the fate of a law that has become fundamental to the digital economy.
On Wednesday, they put forward numerous hypotheses to determine how the platforms could be complicit in acts of terrorism.
In 1997, “CNN gave an interview with Osama Bin Laden, a very famous interview…According to your theory, could CNN have been prosecuted for complicity in the 9/11 attacks?” asked Judge Brett Kavanaugh, for example.
Many voices in the United States Congress are calling for an overhaul of Section 230. However, given the very different perspectives left and right, lawmakers’ efforts to change the text have never been successful.