Fshould he rejoice? Worry about it? Anyway, the die is cast: “Section 230”, the legal pillar of the operation of digital platforms in the United States, will be examined by the Supreme Court. Some are delighted: the debate has been going on for ages; it may be cut off. Others fear the worst, given recent rulings by nine judges on abortion or gun control. The Internet could never be the same again”already alert some experts.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 treats crowdsourced sites as hosts, not publishers, and exempts them from any liability for content posted by users (at exception of pornography). Social networks are protected from prosecution if they eliminate within a time limit “ within reason “ illegal content reported to them.
The article of law has become the target of all those who are unhappy with the way their opinion is treated by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others. Donald Trump, who accused the platforms of censoring conservative views, had moved to have it repealed. Joe Biden, who accuses them of encouraging hate speech, again called on Congress in September to lift their immunity. A bill, known as the Safe Tech Act, plans not to repeal section 230 – to the relief of the tech – but to increase the number of cases in which it cannot be invoked. With the approach of the parliamentary elections of November 8, the discussion on the text got bogged down.
Algorithms and immunity
On October 5, the Supreme Court announced that it had agreed – for the first time – to hear two complaints relating to Section 230. The first, Gonzalez v. Google, comes from the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, the American student killed on November 13, 2015 in the Paris attacks while drinking a beer on the terrace of the Carillon. The family accuses YouTube, the subsidiary of Google, of having not only distributed the recruitment videos of the Islamic State organization, but of having promoted their circulation among Internet users most likely to radicalize, through algorithms of recommendation.
The second complaint – Twitter against Taamneh – was filed by the American family of Nawras Alassaf, a young Jordanian who died in the 2017 attack on an Istanbul nightclub by an Islamist. Twitter’s attorneys requested that the two proceedings be considered together.
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