A variety of interested parties defended “Big Tech’s” liability in a Supreme Court case about algorithms Thursday, with some contending that restricting AI-recommended algorithms would cause several changes to the way Americans utilize the internet.
Tech companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Yelp filed briefs stating that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “vital to the basic function of the web” according to CNN.
Section 230 has been used as a de-facto shield by social media platforms and publishing websites alike to protect itself from content users publish.
The Supreme Court is considering hearing Gonzalez v. Google in which the tech company is being sued for providing pro-ISIS videos to YouTube users through its algorithm. Google has defended itself by saying Section 230 protects it from being held liable for the videos being recommended to users. The Gonzalez family saw one of its members killed in an ISIS attack in Paris in 2015, and are arguing YouTube’s recommended videos can be held responsible for the attack due to anti-terrorism laws.
“If merely displaying third-party content in a user’s feed qualifies as ‘recommending’ it, then many services will face potential liability for virtually all the third-party content they host,” Facebook parent company Meta wrote in a filing, “because nearly all decisions about how to sort, pick, organize, and display third-party content could be construed as ‘recommending’ that content.”
Twitter argued it would take the average user 181 million years to download the data from the internet today to parse through to ensure that each publisher wasn’t responsible for content curated on its platform.
