As Musk Takes Over Twitter, SCOTUS Considers Social Platform Protections
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has come at a remarkable time, “as the law of the internet may be about to enter its most dramatic transition since the days of CompuServe and AOL,” James Romoser reports for SCOTUSBlog.
Landwebs
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has come at a remarkable time, “as the law of the internet may be about to enter its most dramatic transition since the days of CompuServe and AOL,” James Romoser reports for SCOTUSBlog. In October, the Supreme Court added two cases to its docket that will consider Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which currently holds social media sites and services civilly immune from lawsuits related to harmful or illegal user-generated content hosted on their platforms.
Gonzalez v. Google asks justices to decide if Section 230 still protects services if they make targeted recommendations of information from other sources to a user, while Twitter v. Taamneh tackles two issues: whether an online service can be considered to have “knowingly” provided assistance to terrorists under U.S. criminal code because pro-terrorist content was posted on the platform, and whether a service that wasn’t directly used might be held liable for aiding and abetting terrorism under the same statute. “The upshot [of this litigation and controversy] for twitter and social-media companies is a new world of largely unknown risk,” Romoser wrote.
