Social media giant Twitter failed to convince the Supreme Court of the United States that it is not in support of any terrorist groups.
In Twitter vs Taamneh, Seth Waxman argued for Twitter, and US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler was also in support of the social media platform. Meanwhile, Eric Schnapper argued for Taamneh.
Waxman’s arguments pointed out that the complainant would need to go further than highlighting how terrorist organizations generally use social media to recruit and plan attacks. He added that the complainant must instead point to specific posts or accounts that were used to commit a specific terrorist attack.
The arguments continued for a long three hours and the judges seemed to be divided on addressing the question. The court asked what measures should be taken to weigh numerous factors to decide whether Twitter has any level of legal responsibility or not.
The question was asked to the attorneys that represented Twitter; to the family of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man who got murdered in the 2017 ISIS attack; and to the federal government of the United States.
The judges expected more strong points from the part of Twitter which was however not delivered.
The question that the Supreme Court was liable to find an answer to was whether Twitter has its hand on ISIS’s 2017 terrorist attack or not. The terrorist group had used the platform Twitter which is a direct offense to the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).
JASTA allows any national of the United States who gets injured by an act of international terrorism to file a lawsuit against who aids and abets by knowingly providing substantial assistance to anyone who is found guilty of the act.
The law also dictates the courts to refer the verdict of the 1983 Halberstam vs Welch verdict, by a federal appellate court, to know what it means to provide substantial assistance or to aid and abet a terrorist activity.
Twitter hangs on a fine thread to the investigation of it it has hosted content unrelated to the specific incident in a 2017 Istanbul attack by ISIS.
The justices on the panel were Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Twitter has a general motto of moderating and removing terrorist-related content.
The family of the 2017 ISIS Istanbul Reina nightclub shooting victim had first brought the case forward.
Waxman argued that financial service providers such as banks have been found to provide services to terrorists and that the KYC (Know Your Customer) laws should be strengthened first that would prevent the terrorist from having access to such services.
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Solicitor General Kneedler said that financial institutions such as banks have more access to their customers since they have individual encounters with them.
Justice Samuel Alito said that Twitter can win the case by two arguments. The first one would be that the social media company was not aware that its services would be used to carry out a specific attack and the second argument would be that the company has not provided any substantial assistance in the attack.
Justice Coney Barrett stated that to find Twitter guilty of the accused charges, that is aiding and abetting the terrorist act and providing substantial assistance in the attack, the arguments against Twitter would have to prove that the platform Twitter was directly used for the terrorist attack. She added that the platform of Twitter used for general recruitment or radicalization would not validate the case.
Eric Schanpper argued for Taamneh and agreed that they were not making allegations that Twitter was used in a particular way to carry out the terrorist attacks and they were focusing on general recruitment.
Justice Brown Jackson posed a question that whether it was illegal or not to sell a mobile to Osama Bin Laden and say that the seller did not know if it would be used for a terrorist attack or not.
Schnapper replied that it would be needed to prove that the mobile was used by Bin Laden to conduct a terrorist act
A verdict on the case is to be made by the Supreme Court by the month of June 2023.
Just on the previous day, the SCOTUS heard a hearing to determine whether YouTube could be sued or not for giving users recommendations for videos created by ISIS.
Internet and social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia would face a major legal challenge with their expansion of apps and websites hosting or promoting terrorist-related content.
The arguments of the case have a close resemblance to that of a previous lawsuit Gonzalez vs Google which determined whether tech platforms could be held liable for promoting terrorist posts by their recommendation algorithms.
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