SCOTUS hears a case that could transform the internet

In November 2015, three rifle-wielding ISIS gunmen opened fire at restaurant in Paris, killing 23-year-old Nohemi Gonzalez, a college exchange student. Almost eight years later, her family is seeking justice for her death, targeting not the gunmen, but the tech giant YouTube, in a landmark case that could shift the foundations of internet law.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in Gonzalez vs. Google, a lawsuit that argues tech companies should be legally liable for harmful content that their algorithms promote. The Gonzalez family contends that by recommending ISIS-related content, Google’s YouTube acted as a recruiting platform for the group in violation of U.S. laws against aiding and abetting terrorists.

At stake is Section 230, a provision written in 1996, years before the founding of Google and most modern tech giants, but one that courts have found shields them from culpability over the posts, photos and videos that people share on their services.

Google argues that Section 230 protects it from legal responsibility for the videos that its recommendation algorithms surface, and that such immunity is essential to tech companies’ ability to provide useful and safe content to their users.

The Gonzalez family’s lawyers say that applying Section 230 to algorithmic recommendations incentivizes promoting harmful content, and that it denies victims an opportunity to seek redress when they can show those recommendations caused injuries or even death.

The resulting battle has emerged as a political lighting rod because of its potential implications for the future of online speech. Recommendation algorithms underlie almost every interaction people have online, from innocuous song suggestions on Spotify to more nefarious prompts to join groups about conspiracy theories on Facebook.

Section 230 is “a shield that nobody was able to break,” Nitsana DarshanLeitner, the president and founder of Shurat HaDin, an Israeli law center that specializes in suing companies that aid terrorists, and one of the lawyers representing the Gonzalez family, said in an interview. “It gave the social media companies the belief that they’re untouchable.”

YouTube parent company Google has successfully quashed the Gonzalez family lawsuit in lower courts, arguing that Section 230 protects the company when it surfaces a video in the “Up Next” queue on YouTube, or when it ranks one link above another in search results.

But these wins have come over the objections of some prominent judges who say lower courts have read Section 230’s protections too broadly. “The Supreme Court should take up the proper interpretation of Section 230 and bring its wisdom and learning to bear on this complex and difficult topic,” wrote Judge Ronald M. Gould of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said the Supreme Court’s review risks opening up the entire tech industry to a new onslaught of lawsuits, which could make it too costly for some small businesses and websites to operate. “It goes beyond just Google,” DeLaine Prado said. “It really does impact the notion of American innovation.”

The case comes amid growing concern that the laws that govern the internet - many forged years before the invention of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or TikTok - are ill equipped to oversee the modern web. Politicians from both parties are clamoring to introduce new digital rules after the U.S. government has taken a largely laissez-faire approach to tech regulation over the last three decades. But efforts to craft new laws have stalled in Congress, pushing courts and state legislatures to take up the mantle.

Now, the Supreme Court is slated to play an increasingly central role. After hearing the Google case on Tuesday, the justices on

Wednesday will take up Twitter v. Taamneh, another case brought by the family of a terrorist attack victim alleging social media companies are responsible for allowing the Islamic State to use their platforms.

And in the term beginning in October, the court is likely to consider challenges to a law in Florida that would bar social media companies from suspending politicians, and a similar law in Texas that blocks companies from removing content based on a user’s political ideology.

“We’re at a point where both the courts and legislators are considering whether they want to continue to have a hands-off approach to the internet,” said Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and the author of “The TwentySix Words That Created The internet.”