BY LUCY CAULKETT
The man filed the suit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The suit dramatically claims the companies “knowingly permitted” the Islamic State group, ISIS, to recruit members, raise money and spread “extremist propaganda” via their social-media services.
Facebook and Twitter both said on Wednesday that the Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material. Twitter said it has “teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate.”
Facebook equally stated that if the company sees “evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement.”
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Google declined from commenting on pending litigation, but emphasized that it has “clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users.”
U.S. law automatically exempts internet companies from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal “safe harbor” for companies like Twitter and Facebook; it states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
One of the lawyers of the complainant said in an email that the lawsuit targets social-media companies because of the behavior they enabled, not what they published.
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“This complaint is not about what ISIS’s messages say,” he wrote. “It is about Google, Twitter and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations.” The Gonzalez complaint also alleges that Google’s YouTube shared revenue with Islamic State from ads that ran with its videos.
However, it is doubtful that either facebook, twitter, or google, would have knowingly permitted any material in support of terrorism, and their stated policies is most likely going to afford them a defense sufficient to throw the case out. The suit also claims that the defendant companies shared profits connected to advertising with the ISIS group, though what has not been clarified is whether the defendant companies where consciously aware of the connection with the terrorist groups. A lot of the advertising that accompanies several sites are automated, and consistent with the various policies stated by the defendant companies, it is logical to assume they were unaware of the terrorists online activities.
STRANGE
The one strange thing is why it took long for anybody to bring this to their attention or why there does not exist an automated mechanism to inform them that terrorists were promoting their course on the platforms of universally accredited social media platforms. The Paris massacre was one of the deadliest terrorist massacres of recent times, and grieving family members of the dead must be in deep pain and mourning over the murder of their loved ones. However, the social media giants must be given the benefit of the doubt in such a suit, as it is very inlikely they would have endorsed the brutal activities of terrorists on their sites.
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