The Supreme Court’s big internet cases cut across the partisan divide

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear two cases that could decide the future of the Internet, the usual partisan divide doesn’t seem to apply.

Look no further than 27 Attorneys General – Republicans and Democrats from member large and small, including California, Texas, Rhode Island and Alaska, which together urged the court to narrow the range Section 230or what some have called “the twenty-six words that created the Internet.”

The 1990s law protects websites from liability based on their users’ posts. For example, while an individual author can be sued for a defamatory blog post, the platform on which the text appears cannot be.

In particular, lower courts have interpreted the law’s protections to cover recommendation algorithms as well. In the González vs. Google, which the Supreme Court will hear Tuesday, the petitioners — family members of an American who died in the 2015 Paris terror attacks — challenge that reading, arguing that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm helped recruit for the self-proclaimed Islamic State and, therefore, there should be no immunity from suit. Twitter against Taamneh, a similar case expected for Wednesday topics, also refers to the liability of technology companies for terrorism.

The 27 attorneys general seek to limit Section 230’s protections. Social media sites, no he wrote in an amicus briefnot just to provide platforms for content; They “exploit” it to make money using sophisticated algorithms. When Americans are harmed by infringing content propelled by these algorithms, they should have the right to sue the platforms in state courts, the attorneys general argued.

That’s where the bipartisan understanding ends. For every proponent of Section 230’s restrictions—and for every proponent of an expanded interpretation on the other side of the debate—there seems to be a unique motivation.

In New York, for example, the office of Attorney General Letitia James (D) said websites should lose Section 230 protection if they don’t take steps to prevent users from encouraging or planning acts of violence.

In Texas and Florida, after Republicans passed bills banning political discrimination by social media giants, they quickly faced lawsuits from the tech industry citing Section 230 (and the First Amendment).

A similar lawsuit was filed in California after the state passed a bipartisan bill establishing rules for websites “likely to be accessed by children.” Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), in a press release regarding Section 230, cited investigations he has conducted into the treatment of minors by social media companies.

In other amicus briefs for the Gonzalez case, scholars and activists on both sides make a surprising variety of causes.

The Anti-Defamation League said Section 230 should not automatically shield platforms from liability if they promote hate and extremism. A brief from the Cyber ​​​​​​​​​​​Civil Rights Initiative concerns the case of a massive impersonation scheme by a man’s ex-boyfriend on Grindr, in which the victim’s lawsuit against the dating app was blocked of Section 230. National. The Center on Sexual Exploitation and other groups pointed out that the law was used to protect websites from lawsuits related to hosting child sexual abuse images.

Notably, both President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, have expressed opposition to Section 230, but for very different reasons.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden declared his opposition to the law after a New York Times writer asked about an ad that appeared on Facebook accusing him of corruption related to Ukraine. And in 2021, he raged that social media platforms were “killing people” with misinformation about COVID-19 — a remark followed by a spokesman’s announcement that the White House was “reviewing” Section 230. In a brief by Gonzalez, the administration Biden argued that Section 230 does not protect against lawsuits based on the design and implementation of “targeted recommendation algorithms.”

Trump, for his part, began protesting the law after Twitter began verifying his lies about mail-in voting.

To be clear, Section 230 doesn’t exactly apply to Trump ads. At least for now, the First Amendment protects the ability of sites to fact-check, censor, or ban anyone they want regardless of Section 230.

But some conservatives, echoing their leader, said the alleged bias in content moderation should mean the end of the law’s protections. In the Gonzalez case, a group of Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) argued that Section 230’s immunity for “good faith” content moderation does not extend to “removing or restricting content because of user policy,” nor to “remove content that any eggshell user may find offensive”.

Of course, Section 230 has plenty of supporters among tech giants and trade associations, but Meta and Google aren’t the only voices in the law’s corner.

Consider Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s non-profit parent organization, which told the high court that without current Section 230 protections, the lawsuits “would drain the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual litigation budget.”

Reddit, in its own report, noted that Section 230 granted a volunteer moderator of the site’s r/Screenwriting community immunity from a lawsuit filed by the disgruntled operator of a screenwriting contest that other users had accused of being a scam . In its brief, Yelp said, “Without immunity, misleading reviews would flourish and consumers would be harmed.”

Various civil liberties groups and think tanks, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Cato Institute AND Reason Foundation, upheld the law as currently interpreted. And in one short joint led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, various library groups and the nonprofit Internet Archive have said Section 230 is an essential protection.

“The free expression of Internet users would be severely impaired” if Section 230 protections were stripped from Web reference and other basic tools, the groups said, arguing that they are the digital equivalent of newspaper publishers’ choices about layout , photos and font sizes.

Other groups, including those Bipartisan political center AND Institute of Progressive Policies, asked the court to allow Congress to change the law if it wanted, rather than drastically alter the interpretation of a decision. And some advocates have called for the law to be changed to account for “reasonable” efforts by websites to prevent illegal behavior. Several members of Congress did Already drafted their own reforms.

Section 230 was previously amended by a law known as FOSTA, or the Empowering States and Victims to Combat Online Sex Trafficking Act. Trump signed FOSTA into law in 2018, removing Section 230 protections for websites that facilitate prostitution and sex trafficking. Some prostitutes criticized the move because it marked the death of safe online platforms for their work.

FOSTA was received in the Senate only two “no” votes. – of Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who was one of the two authors of the original Section 230 while serving in the House with then-Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.).

Both Wyden and Cox expressed reservations about the impact of their legislation. “The original purpose of this law was to help clean up the Internet, not to make it easier for people to do bad things on the Internet.” Cox told NPR in 2018. And Wyden, speaking to the New York Times one year later, recalled a comment he made at a technology workers’ conference, referring to the “sword” of restraint and the “shield” of liability protection. “[If] if you don’t use the sword, people will come who will come for your shield,” he said.

However, Wyden and Cox wrote their own brief for The González case, arguing against Google and a limited view of the law they have created. Internet explosion because the passage of Article 230 was in itself proof of the law’s utility, they wrote.

“The real-time transmission of user-generated content that section 230 promotes has become the backbone of online activity upon which countless Internet users and platforms rely,” the brief states. “Given the sheer volume of content created by Internet users today, the protections of Section 230 are even more important now than when the statute was enacted.”