Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act grants limited immunity to providers of “interactive computer services,” but for nearly two decades, lower courts have ignored the plain language of that federal statute, providing instead the sweeping immunity Big Tech hides behind to censor conservative speech.
While later this morning the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the scope of Section 230 immunity in Gonzalez v. Google, the facts of that case make it unlikely that the high court will clarify — much less constrict — the limits of the statutory shield raised by giants such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
In 2015, ISIS launched a spate of attacks in and around Paris, including one at the La Belle Équipe bistro, where terrorists murdered a 23-year-old American woman, Nohemi Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s family later filed a lawsuit against Google, which owns YouTube, under the Antiterrorism Act, claiming that Google “aided” ISIS’s efforts to recruit members by allowing the terrorist organization to post videos on YouTube and by “recommending ISIS videos to users through its algorithms.” The Gonzalezes would later concede Google could not be sued for allowing ISIS to post videos on YouTube.
Without deciding whether Google could be liable under the Antiterrorism Act, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in Gonzalez v. Google that the tech giant could not be sued because it held immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Of relevance to the lawsuit are two subsections of Section 230(c). Subsection (c)(1)
