Supreme Court Swats Down Attempts to Hold Twitter, Google Financially Liable for Terrorism

May 19, 2023

The narrow rulings concluded the platforms aren’t responsible for bad people using their communication services.

by Scott Shackford Reason.com

Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Twitter and Google in two separate cases that attempted to hold the sites financially liable under federal law for terrorists who used their platforms (and algorithms) to recruit members and then launch deadly attacks.

At the heart of the two cases, Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google, was a question of whether the two websites had essentially “aided and abetted” Islamic State group terrorists by failing to adequately moderate the content on their platforms. Each case involved Islamic State group terrorists launching deadly attacks (one in France and one in Turkey) and relatives attempting to lay part of the financial responsibility on social media platforms for their use as recruiting tools. (Full disclosure: Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, submitted an amicus brief in support of Google in Gonzalez v. Google.)