"Family of American terror victim asks Supreme Court to curb immunity for social media", 23 January 2023

... Seven years after Islamic State extremists murdered their daughter, the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, the only American killed in the 2015 Paris terror attacks, heads to the U.S. Supreme Court next month seeking to pin some responsibility for the tragedy on social media giant YouTube.

"If some changes can be done to prevent these terrorist people [from] keeping killing human beings, then that is a big thing," Beatrice Gonzalez, Nohemi Gonzalez's mother, told ABC News in the family's first interview about the case.

Beatrice Gonzalez alleges that Google's YouTube algorithms -- a series of proprietary software instructions which recommend video content to users -- effectively amplified Islamic State-produced materials in support of the extremists that killed her daughter, a 23-year-old college student who had been studying in France.

The family wants to bring a case against the company under the Anti-Terrorism Act but has been blocked from doing so because of a landmark federal law that has given sweeping legal immunity to social media companies for more than 25 years.

Oral arguments at the Supreme Court set for Feb. 21 in Gonzalez v. Google, the parent company of YouTube, will focus on the scope of that immunity, whether it covers algorithms, and whether Gonzalez should be able to pursue her claims in court.

The company has expressed sympathy to the Gonzales family but strongly denies any connection to the attack.

YouTube says it bans terrorist content across its platform and that its algorithms help catch and remove violent extremist videos, noting 95% of those removed last year were automatically detected -- most before receiving fewer than 10 views.

"Undercutting Section 230 would make it harder for websites to do this work," YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told ABC News.

Lower courts have said Section 230 protects algorithms from liability claims, siding with Google.

For years, members of Congress from both parties have debated changes to Section 230 in order to promote greater transparency and accountability of internet companies.

President Joe Biden in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed called for "fundamental reform" to the law, but there is not a political consensus on the way forward.

The Gonzalez case is the first time the nation's highest court will consider limits to immunity for internet companies.

Advocates for overhauling Section 230 say the legal protection far exceeds what Congress intended, much earlier in the development of the modern internet, and insulates companies from accountability.

"When this statute was enacted in 1996, it was for the express purpose of protecting kids from seeing obscene material online and protecting companies who take obscene material offline to protect kids. And it's been turned on its head," said Matthew Bergman, an attorney and founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, who represents hundreds of plaintiffs alleging harm from social media use.

Frances Haugen, the former Facebook insider who has warned Congress about the harms of internet companies' algorithms, said setting new limits on legal immunity could incentivize companies to improve their products.

The tech industry agrees that lawmakers, not the high court, should be the final arbiters of internet policy and that changes to immunity protection are not in Americans' best interest.

But Bergman, the attorney for social media users claiming harm, and the Gonzalez family argue that the justices need to act under a plain reading of the law and permit the Gonzalez family to move forward with their suit against YouTube's parent company.

Beatrice Gonzalez said she did not bring the case seeking financial compensation from Google and is instead seeking to enact a small change to the system in her daughter's memory.