Justice Thomas kicked things off by saying that if an algorithm recommends ISIS videos based on a user's history and also recommends cooking videos, then how can it be held responsible? Justice Jackson maybe is most sympathetic to the Gonzalez family. Kagan was echoed by Kavanaugh who specified that Congress had this broad language in Section 230. And all courts had interpreted that to provide protection for conducts like YouTube.
As Justice Kagan has asked, “Every other industry has to internalize the costs of its conduct. Why is it that the tech industry gets a pass?” Yet she and the other 8 Supreme Court Justices seemed wary this week as they heard oral arguments in two cases that could upend the Section 230 immunity that social media companies enjoy, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh. Today, we hear from three experts: Stanford Law professor Evelyn Douek, National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen and UC Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid. Up for discussion — what’s at stake in these two cases, which way the wind seems to be blowing and, of course, will killing Section 230 kill the internet?
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