Meta, Microsoft and other big tech companies urged the US Supreme Court exclude AI-powered algorithms from any lawsuit. A handful of companies, academics and human rights defenders have appeared in court in a case against Google. The bigtech and internet pundits mentioned that allowing litigation against algorithms would open a Pandora’s box that would end internet freedom.
The case in question is Gonzalez v. Google LLC, a lawsuit filed against Google by relatives of Nohemí González, one of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. The plaintiffs argue that YouTube algorithm recommended recruitment videos for ISIS, so Google is partially responsible for the death of the young woman. Although a court ruled in favor of the technology, the case was brought up by the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs indicate that the recommendation algorithms are a form of moderation that is not covered by Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This section, of just 26 words, grants a service provider immunity from content posted by third parties on its platform. The González family believes that companies should take responsibility for the recommendations generated by these artificial intelligence algorithms.
As part of the case review process, the Supreme Court heard from a group made up of representatives from Meta, Twitter and Microsoft, as well as academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reddit moderators. They all concluded that Section 230 is vital to the basic function of the internet and that a ruling allowing litigation against the algorithms would set a precedent for future lawsuits against other recommender systems.
The importance of artificial intelligence algorithms in moderation
Reddit Moderators they mentioned that Section 230 has been instrumental in allowing communities to flourish. The content rules are enforced by the moderators and not the company itself. Without the shelter of this law, companies and users would face lawsuits for daily content moderation decisions.
Congress designed Section 230 to enable effective content moderation, and automated tools are essential to help humans moderate the endless sea of Internet content. While the petitioners and some of their friends try to challenge algorithms, an algorithm is simply a rule created by humans to handle a particular situation, which can then be applied on a scale that humans could never achieve.
The The internet could not work without algorithmic tools., since moderation teams couldn’t handle tens of millions of shares without help. “No group of human beings could manually filter the vast universe of content on Reddit or many other online platforms without automated tools,” they mentioned. Yelp said that It would take an average user approximately 181 million years to download all the data from the web..
For its part, the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, which has criticized YouTube and other big tech companies for allowing hate speech, recognizes the value of Section 230 in guaranteeing freedom of expression on the internet. . In his presentationthe Center said that without this shield, platforms would reduce or remove third-party content before filtering it. “Collateral censorship would be the cheapest route and the one most providers would take, to the detriment of valuable online speech,” he said.
Section 230 is key to freedom of expression and the functioning of the internet
Section 230 has been in the eye of the storm for a few years now. Donald Trump tried to torpedo it in response to Twitter’s actions of placing a hashtag on its tweets during the 2020 election campaign. Through an executive order, Trump sought to amend the Communications Decency Act to “fight online censorship «.
The lawsuit against Google is not the only Section 230 case to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Twitter Inc v. Taamneh is another similar lawsuit filed by relatives of a victim of terrorist attacks. The petitions to the judicial body are based on the Anti-Terrorism Law of 1996, proposed by then Senator Joe Biden.