The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Twitter in a case experts said could have fundamentally changed how the internet works.
The court unanimously ruled in narrow terms in Twitter. v. Taamneh that the plaintiffs, who had sued Twitter for allegedly assisting Islamic State terrorists by hosting their content, had failed to state a claim regarding Twitter’s role in facilitating terrorism. The decision offered a sigh of relief to the tech industry, which has warned that Taamneh or the similar case of Gonzalez v. Google, also decided on Thursday, could have undermined the rules undergirding the modern internet.
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“We conclude that plaintiffs’ allegations are insufficient to establish that these defendants aided and abetted ISIS in carrying out the relevant attack,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion.
The case intended to determine whether the Big Tech social platform could be held liable for the attack under the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The court decided that the principle of “aiding and abetting” did not apply directly since the degrees of separation between the direct crimes of terrorism and the hosting of the content were not directly near each other.
Thomas noted that the plaintiffs “failed to allege that defendants intentionally provided any substantial aid” to the 2017 ISIS terrorist attack in 2017 and that they failed to prove that Twitter “pervasively and systemically” provided ISIS aid in a way that would make it liable for “every ISIS attack.”
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“It might be that bad actors like ISIS can use platforms like defendants’ for illegal — and sometimes terrible — ends,” Thomas wrote. “But the same could be said of cell phones, email, or the internet generally.”
The decision was released at the same time as Google v. Gonzalez, which deals with YouTube and Section 230, a crucial part of telecommunications law that protects websites from being held liable for content posted by users. Gonzalez was dismissed on Taamneh’s basis and declined to address the case’s implications for Section 230.
