Supreme Court avoids ruling on law shielding internet companies from being sued for what users post
The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Google, Twitter and Facebook in lawsuits seeking to hold them liable for terrorist attacks. But the justices sidestepped the big issue hovering over the cases, the federal law that shields social media companies from being sued over content posted by others. The justices unanimously rejected a lawsuit alleging that the companies allowed their platforms to be used to aid and abet an attack at a Turkish nightclub that killed 39 people in 2017. In the case of an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, a unanimous court returned the case to a lower court, but said there appeared to be little, if anything, left of it. The high court initially took up the Google case to decide whether the companies' legal shield for the social media posts of others, contained in a 1996 law known as Section 230, is too broad.
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The outcome for now is a victory for the tech industry, though the high court remains free to take up the issue in a later case.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans were perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
