“ISIS Is Using Your Platform”: Twitter Accused Of “Blindness” Towards Terrorism

Washington:

Twitter was accused of turning a blind eye to the ISIS group in the US Supreme Court on Wednesday as judges struggled to determine whether social media sites can be held liable for terrorist acts.

In a two-hour hearing, nine justices of the top US court heard allegations that Twitter should be on the hook for “aiding and abetting” by failing to curb content created by extremist groups.

Addressing Twitter’s attorney, Justice Sonia Sotomayor used an acronym for Islamic State, saying, “There is an allegation of willful blindness here … You knew ISIS was using your platform.”

The case was brought by the family of a victim of a 2017 attack by the group, also known as IS, at a nightclub in Istanbul.

The family alleges that Twitter’s failure to stop recommending and removing ISIS tweets supported an act of terror.

The hearing comes a day after a similar case against YouTube was put before the same nine judges. That case involved an American victim of the 2015 Paris attacks, which were also claimed by the ISIS group.

Twitter, backed by a broad swath of big tech players, insists that the mere fact of being a platform used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide does not help it “know” a terrorist group.

At the heart of both cases, which must be decided by June 30, is the broad legal immunity granted to tech platforms through a decades-old law that makes lawsuits over material matters nearly impossible.

Tech companies view the US law, known as Section 230, as a fundamental text of the internet that helped spark the social media revolution by protecting websites from an avalanche of legal proceedings.

Twitter’s case will theoretically hinge on the judges rewriting Section 230, an event that seemed uncertain on Tuesday after the judges expressed some doubt over changing the law.

The unease continued on Wednesday as the justices gave lawyers a long series of hypothetical situations to establish how accountability in terrorism cases might apply to social media platforms.

In 1997, “CNN did an interview of Osama bin Laden, a very famous interview of his… Can, under your theory, CNN be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the September 11 attacks?” asked Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In another question, Justice Clarence Thomas asked a lawyer for Twitter whether a gun was “lent to a friend who was a robber, a murderer and a thief, but other than that he was a good guy… Can (he) be helpful and provoke?”

Some justices on Tuesday complained that changes to Section 230 would be more appropriately handled by US lawmakers and expressed concern over the potential to destabilize the economy if they amended its provisions unilaterally.

However, the US Congress is deeply divided politically and efforts to reinstate Section 230’s legal shield have failed to reach a vote.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)