Supreme Court will take up a case challenging legal immunity for tech sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google

• Tech companies, like Google, have come under fire recently for recommending terrorist content.
• Until now, a part of US law called Section 230, has given tech companies legal immunity over moderating content.

The Supreme Court on Monday announced it will take up a case challenging legal immunity for tech sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The case — Gonzalez v. Google — seeks to hold Google legally liable for a deadly 2015 Paris terrorist attack, alleging the tech giant recommended ISIS videos to users and boosted the terrorist group's recruitment.

Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have railed against the Section 230 protections, which protect tech companies from lawsuits targeted at user-created content.

What is Section 230?

In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which prevents people from knowingly distributing obscene content to minors under the age of 18.

But they buried a small section within the law called Section 230. It effectively protects tech companies from being liable for third-party content that is reposted on their platforms. It stipulates 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."

The law essentially frees tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the responsibility for content posted on their platforms.

It also means that Facebook, for example, has the authority to deem which posts are objectionable posts and which ones are not. The law gives tech companies a free pass to moderate content on their platforms according to their own whims.

Section 230 has been a point of contention for presidential administrations across the aisle. Both Trump and Biden made moves to repeal the law, though not for the same reasons.

After Twitter began flagging Trump's tweets back in 2020, the former president began calling for the repeal of Section 230. Trump believed tech companies were using the law to enforce anti-conservative biases.

In May 2020, Trump issued an executive order that sought to limit the legal protections Twitter and other tech companies had under Section 230.

Biden swiftly repealed Trump's order once he assumed office. However, Biden has argued that Section 230 prevents companies like Twitter and Facebook from taking responsibility for growing rates of misinformation on their platforms.

Tech CEOs have, naturally, responded with shock and dismay at the potential dismantling of Section 230.

YouTube's CEO Susan Wojcicki, became one of the first big tech executives to weigh in publicly on Section 230 in 2019, when she told 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl that, "if we were held liable for every single piece of content that we recommended, we would have to review it. That would mean there'd be a much smaller set of information that people would be finding. Much, much smaller."

Since then, several other big tech CEOs have commented on the importance of keeping Section 230 intact.

At a Senate Judiciary hearing in October 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that repealing the law would "collapse how we communicate on the Internet."

At that same hearing, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey labeled Section 230 as "the most important law protecting internet speech." He added that removing Section 230 would "remove speech from the internet."

The CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, Sundar Pichai argued at a congressional hearing on misinformation in 2021 that "without Section 230, platforms would either over-filter content or not be able to filter content at all."

He added that, "Section 230 allows companies to take decisive action on harmful misinformation and keep up with bad actors who work hard to circumvent their policies."