Justices avoid weighing in on law which shields internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users

The US supreme court issued two decisions on Thursday that reinforced existing protections for internet platforms against being held liable for content, marking a victory for tech behemoths including Twitter and Google.

The cases had been closely watched for their impact on a federal law known as section 230, which protects internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users, a law that – if successfully challenged – could have upended the rules of the internet.

The justices delivered a victory to Twitter in the first case, reversing a lower court’s ruling to revive a lawsuit that attempted to hold the platform liable under an anti-terrorism law. American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man killed in a 2017 attack during New Year’s celebration in an Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group, alleged Twitter failed to stop the militant organization from using the platform.

In the second case, the justices returned to a lower court lawsuit against Google, the owner of YouTube, brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. The lower court had thrown out the lawsuit. The family wanted to sue Google for YouTube videos they said helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them.

Civil liberties organizations are praising the supreme court decision saying protecting section 230 is essential to enabling free speech on the internet.

“We are pleased that the court did not address or weaken section 230, which remains an essential part of the architecture of the modern internet and will continue to enable user access to online platforms,” said David Greene, director at Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties.

However, some say the supreme court avoided answering important questions when delivering their opinions. “Questions about the scope of platforms’ immunity under section 230 are consequential and will certainly come up soon in other cases,” said Anna Diakun, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Google said the court’s decision would reassure the “companies, scholars, content creators and civil society organizations who joined with us in this case”.

“We’ll continue our work to safeguard free expression online, combat harmful content and support businesses and creators who benefit from the internet,” said Halimah DeLaine Prado, the Google general counsel.

The outcome is, at least for now, a victory for the tech industry, which predicted havoc on the internet if Google or Twitter lost. But the high court remains free to take up the issue in a later case.

In the lawsuit against Twitter, the relatives of Alassaf, who was killed in the Istanbul massacre on 1 January 2017, along with 38 others, accused the company of aiding and abetting the IS by failing to police the platform for the group’s accounts or posts.

The case hinged on whether the family’s claims sufficiently alleged that the company knowingly provided “substantial assistance” to an “act of international terrorism” that would allow the relatives to maintain their suit and seek damages under the anti-terrorism law. After a judge dismissed the lawsuit, a San Francisco appeal court in 2021 allowed it to proceed, concluding that Twitter had refused to take “meaningful steps” to prevent IS’s use of the platform.

The conservative justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the ruling, said the allegations made by the plaintiffs were insufficient because they “point to no act of encouraging, soliciting or advising the commission” of the attack.

In an amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, the Knight Foundation and others, the civil liberties organizations argued that holding Twitter liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act would chill free speech by making platforms more “risk-averse and more susceptible to overly cautious moderation”.

“Given the vast amounts of speech that online intermediaries handle every day … intermediaries would be likely to use necessarily blunt content moderation tools to over-restrict speech or to impose blanket bans on certain topics, speakers, or specific types of content,” the brief read.

Chris Marchese, an attorney with NetChoice, a technology industry group that counts Twitter, Meta and Google as members, said that imposing liability on services such as Twitter for harmful content that falls through the crack “would have disincentivized them from hosting any user-generated content”.

“Even with the best moderation systems available, a service like Twitter alone cannot screen every single piece of user-generated content with 100% accuracy,” said Marchese.