Supreme Court hears a case that could transform internet

WASHINGTON — In November 2015, three riflewielding ISIS gunmen opened fire at restaurant in Paris, killing 23-yearold 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.

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.