The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday refused to pave the best way for victims of attacks by militant organizations to carry social media corporations accountable under the Terrorism Act for failing to stop groups from using their platforms, handing the victory to Twitter.
The court in a separate case involving Google avoided an try and weaken the legal protection of Web corporations.
The judges, in a 9-0 decision, overturned a lower court ruling that revived a lawsuit against Twitter filed by American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian killed in a 2017 attack during Recent 12 months’s celebrations at an Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group.
The case was one in every of two that the Supreme Court has considered in its current term, searching for to carry Web corporations accountable for controversial user-posted content, a difficulty of accelerating concern to the general public and US lawmakers.
Judges on Thursday in the same case against Google-owned YouTube, a part of Alphabet, avoided ruling on an try and narrow a federal law protecting online corporations from lawsuits for content posted by their users – called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In a transient and unsigned ruling, the judges returned to a lower court a lawsuit filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old student from California who was fatally shot in an Islamic State attack in Paris in 2015. the court dismissed the claim.
![Reynaldo Gonzalez breaks down remembering his daughter Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the Paris attacks.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011299606.jpg?w=1024)
![Nohemi Gonzalez's parents speak in February.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011299514.jpg?w=1024)
The Istanbul massacre on January 1, 2017 killed Alassaf and 38 others. His relatives have accused Twitter of aiding and abetting the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack, by failing to observe the platform for the group’s accounts or posts in violation of a federal law called the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows Americans to get well damages related to “a world act terrorism.”
Twitter and its supporters have said allowing lawsuits like this threatens web corporations with liability for providing publicly available services to billions of users, as a few of them could also be members of militant groups, although the platforms repeatedly implement rules on terrorism-related content.
The case trusted whether the family’s claims sufficiently showed that the corporate knowingly provided “substantial assistance” to an “act of international terrorism” that will allow the relatives to uphold the lawsuit and seek damages under anti-terrorism law.
![Flowers are placed in front of a police barrier near the entrance to the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, site of the 2017 attack.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011298803.jpg?w=1024)
![Twitter logo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011296510.jpg?w=1024)
After the judge dismissed the lawsuit, San Francisco’s ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 allowed it to proceed, stating that Twitter had refused to take “significant steps” to stop Islamic State from using the platform.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the ruling, said the allegations made by the plaintiffs were insufficient as they “don’t indicate any act of encouraging, inducing or advising the commission” of the attack.
“Quite, they mainly portray the defendants as witnesses, passively watching ISIS perform their nefarious plans,” Thomas added.
President Joe Biden’s administration supported Twitter, claiming that the Counterterrorism Act imposes liability for aiding a terrorist act, not for “generally assisting a foreign terrorist organization” with no causal link to the act in query.
![Supreme Court building](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000007068054.jpg?w=1024)
Within the case of Twitter, the ninth Circuit didn’t consider whether Section 230 precluded a family lawsuit. Google and Meta-owned Facebook, also sued, didn’t formally join Twitter’s appeal.
The Islamic State called the attack in Istanbul retaliation for Turkey’s military involvement in Syria. The major suspect, Abdulkadir Masharipov, an Uzbek national, was later captured by the police.
Twitter, in court documents, said it had shut down greater than 1.7 million accounts for violating its rules against “threatening or promoting terrorism.”
The case against Google concerned a 1996 U.S. law referred to as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides safeguards for “interactive computing services” by ensuring that they can’t be considered for legal purposes as “publishers or speakers” of data provided by users.
The family argued that YouTube provided illegal aid to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack by recommending militant group content to users.
Of their transient ruling on Thursday, the judges wrote that they “refuse to think about the appliance (Article 230) to the criticism, which appears to contain few, if any, credible claims for redress.”