How Sec. 230 Kills
Social media get to flirt with terror
SOCIAL-media companies can no longer shirk responsibility for profit-driven algorithms that boost terrorist content. This week I — with some help from the US Supreme Court — sought to bring a wrecking ball to the archaic wall of protective legislation enabling them.
On Oct. 13, 2015, two Hamas supporters boarded the No. 78 bus in Jerusalem and massacred passengers. The killings were inspired by Facebook pages and social media the terrorists were active on. They followed materials that radicalized groups posted using Facebook’s platform.
There was everything for the wannabe jihadist: clerics and terror chieftains calling to kill Jews, glorification of past terror acts and anatomical diagrams showing the most lethally effective areas to shoot or stab.
It was not isolated. In fall 2015, terrorists and lone wolves incited to violence killed and wounded scores of Israelis in random, socialmedia-inspired stabbing, shooting, bludgeoning and car-ramming attacks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled the wave of terror the “Facebook Intifada.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t commit the acts, but the Facebook parent firm’s universe aided and abetted these crimes, and it did so protected by an impregnable wall of absolute immunity created by 26 words of an obsolete codicil of legislative doublespeak written in 1996: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230’s wording — “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” — was intended to nurture the nascent companies by sheltering them from bad-faith lawsuits based on content.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of 230’s authors, said it was intended “to give up-and-coming tech firms a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online.” He noted “social media — as a result of Section 230 — has been a huge megaphone for people who want to challenge those in power.”
Yet the way it has allowed terror to metastasize on the Internet isn’t about power, free speech or innovation.
Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies are not in the morality business; they’re driven by profits and ad-revenue-generated quarterly earnings. Provocative material — even the live-streaming of a catastrophic terror event — produces millions of clicks, likes, shares and dollars.
It is not just Facebook. Twitter, Instagram and especially YouTube became go-to terror platforms for propaganda videos — barbaric films showing beheadings and immolations — used to recruit terrorists and raise money. Operational orders for strikes, such as the ISIS November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, were disseminated online.
I represent the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American exchange student murdered in the Paris terror. We believe Google, YouTube’s parent company, became ISIS’s propaganda and operational arm.
Shurat HaDin, the human-rights organization I created in Israel to fight for terror victims’ rights, started battling Section 230 before the Facebook Intifada. We gathered petitions, filed lawsuits and repeatedly had our cases thrown out of federal and state courts because of the 1996 legislation. It blocked our path to get anyone to show moral backbone or take responsibility for a lethal problem. Section 230 shields the tech giants from criminal and civil liability over the content they disseminate. This interpretation has left behind heavy collateral damage.
Our efforts for justice for Nohemi Gonzalez were repeatedly stymied, but in October 2022, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear Gonzalez v. Google. The court found possible merit in the glaring reality that changes to Section 230 are needed.
Since Shurat HaDin added the social-media giants to the list of terrorists and their supporters — Iran, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah and the banks that finance them, to name a few — countless innocents have been murdered by extremists who have posted manifestos, living wills, heinous plans and have even live-streamed murders. Across the world, from Pittsburgh to Christchurch, social-media-empowered bloodshed can no longer be ignored.
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, one of two terror-related cases before the justices challenging Section 230. The tech giants have circled their wagons defending their legislative armor. Meta warned changing Section 230 “would incentivize online services to remove important, provocative, and controversial content on issues of public concern, frustrating what Congress intended to be a vibrant marketplace of diverse perspectives.”
There is nothing vibrant about terrorists using legislative protection as a lethal weapon. We need to reexamine these 26 words that helped kill Nohemi Gonzalez.
Justice and common-sense decency must once and for all prevail.