Supreme Court Hands Tech Industry Win by Leaving Section 230 Internet Shield in Place
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued unanimous rulings on two cases that could have upended the existing legal-liability shield internet companies have regarding user posts on social media. The decisions left untouched Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. As currently interpreted, Section 230 grants internet companies broad legal protections for user-posted content on their services. The two related cases, which had been appealed to the Supreme Court, threatened to erode the protections of Section 230. In the first case, Twitter v. Taamneh, plaintiffs claimed that Twitter was liable for allegedly “aiding and abetting” an attack in Istanbul by ISIS because Twitter failed to adequately block or remove content promoting terrorism (even though Twitter had no specific knowledge that any particular post furthered a terrorist act). In its ruling, the Supreme Court held that hosting, displaying and recommending videos, without more, is not aiding and abetting terrorism. The court noted that all content is sorted by algorithms and that using content-agnostic recommendation algorithms is insufficient to create liability.