Vox media law fires hundreds blaming12/20/2023 Federal antiterrorism law provides that a plaintiff who successfully shows that a company knowingly provided “substantial assistance” to a terrorist act “shall recover threefold the damages he or she sustains and the cost of the suit.” So even an enormous company like Google could face the kind of liability that could endanger the entire company if these lawsuits prevail.Ī second possibility is that these companies, faced with such extraordinary liability, would instead choose to censor millions of peaceful social media users in order to make sure that no terrorism-related content slips through. Twitter, for example, says that it has “ terminated over 1.7 million accounts” for violating its policies forbidding content promoting terrorism or other illegal activities.īut if the Court decides they should be legally responsible for removing every last bit of content from terrorists, that opens them up to massive liability. It’s not immediately clear that these tech companies are capable of sniffing out everyone associated with ISIS who uses their websites - although they claim to try to track down at least some ISIS members. There are a number of entirely plausible legal arguments, which have been embraced by some of the leading minds on the lower federal courts, that endanger much of the modern-day internet’s ability to function. And the possibility of serious disruption is fairly high. The stakes in Gonzalez and Twitter are enormous. The plaintiffs in both suits rely on a federal law that allows “any national of the United States” who is injured by an act of international terrorism to sue anyone who “ aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to anyone who commits “such an act of international terrorism.” The thrust of both lawsuits is that websites like Twitter, Facebook, or Google-owned YouTube are legally responsible for the two ISIS killings because ISIS was able to post recruitment videos and other content on these websites that were not immediately taken down. Taamneh, Alassaf’s relatives make similar claims against Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Google, Gonzalez’s survivors claim that the tech giant Google should compensate them for the loss of their loved one. In response to these horrific acts, Gonzalez’s and Alassaf’s families brought federal lawsuits pinning the blame for these attacks on some very unlikely defendants. ISIS also claimed responsibility for this act of mass murder. One of them was Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American student who died after ISIS assailants opened fire on the café where she and her friends were eating dinner.Ī little more than a year later, on New Year’s Day 2017, a gunman opened fire inside a nightclub in Istanbul, killing 39 people - including a Jordanian national named Nawras Alassaf who has several American relatives. In 2015, individuals affiliated with the terrorist group ISIS conducted a wave of violence and mass murder in Paris - killing 129 people.
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