Justices to hear case that targets tech giants

Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old California college student, was studying abroad in Paris in November 2015 when she was among the 130 people killed in a coordinated series of terrorist attacks throughout the city.

The next year, her father sued Google and other tech companies. He accused the firms of spreading content that radicalized users into becoming terrorists and said they were therefore legally responsible for the harm inflicted on Gonzalez's family. Her mother, stepfather and brothers eventually joined the lawsuit, too.

Their claims will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court today. And their lawsuit, with Google now the exclusive defendant, could have potentially seismic ramifications for the social media platforms that have become conduits of communication, commerce and culture for billions of people.

Their suit takes aim at a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google's YouTube from lawsuits over content posted by their users or their decisions to take content down. The case gives the Supreme Court's justices the opportunity to narrow how that legal shield is applied or to gut it entirely, potentially opening up the companies to liability for what users post and to lawsuits over libel, discriminatory advertising and extremist propaganda.

A day after hearing the Gonzalez v. Google case, the court is scheduled to hear a second tech lawsuit, Twitter v. Taamneh, over whether Twitter has contributed to terrorism.