Huge Internet Ruling by Supreme Court

welcome once again to Leto's law here's Steve lato as you know the Supreme Court often makes rulings that can reshape our world and once in a while they have the opportunity to do that and they don't and sometimes that's good but a very very important decision was just handed down by the Supreme Court and it didn't get as much attention in the news as I would have thought and so I had a few people send this to me Supreme Court Shields Twitter from liability for Terror related content and leaves section 230 untouched and the real important part here is section 230 and you may have heard about this if you studied things revolving around the internet because that's the one that says that somebody who runs a website that lets other people post on that website the people who run the website cannot be held liable for things posted by others the other people who posted it could be held liable but the simply the person who hosts the website that's one of the things about section 230. there's more there's more but we'll get into this but you may have heard of this because I can tell you I ran a bulletin board back in the old days regarding metal detectors and people would come on there and discuss metal detectors and what they'd found and where they hunted and things like that and there are always people out there who will ruin it for everybody and I was the owner of the website and the moderator and I had to go in and look at people's comments and you'd be amazed what people will post when they think they're doing it anonymously on the internet and so if I was going to be held liable for something someone posted I just wouldn't allow it accept posts I would just say I'm sorry I can't have a bulletin board and so likewise if Twitter was to be held liable for everything everybody tweeted Twitter would cease to exist now I know some people want to say Steve I wouldn't mind if Twitter ceased to exist well but there are other places so for instance YouTube beneath every video of mine is a place for comments if you could sue me or YouTube for the comments beneath my videos um what would happen is they would just shut the comments off you just couldn't make comments and so the question then becomes from a bigger policy issue which is more important having this robust discussion beneath the videos or having no discussion at all so the Supreme Court handed Silicon Valley a massive Victory on Thursday I think it handed everybody big victory as a protected online platforms from two lawsuits that legal experts had warned could have upended the internet the twin decisions preserve social media companies ability to avoid lawsuits arising from content posted by others enter a defeat for tech industry critics who say platforms are unaccountable and so doing the court side of the tech industry and digital rights groups who had claimed exposing Tech platforms to more reliability could break the basic functions of many websites and potentially even create legal risk for individual internet users in one of the two cases uh Supreme Court ruled that Twitter will not have to face accusations that aided and abetted terrorism when tweets were posted there and hosted then by Twitter and posted thereby groups posting those things the court also dismissed another case against Google closely watched about social media content moderation and they sidestepped an invitation to narrow a key Federal liability shield for websites known as section 230 of the communications decency act the decision leaves a lower Court ruling in place that protected social media platforms from a broad range of content moderation lawsuits so they're two slightly different things Twitter is about simply people tweeting things and people saying Twitter should be liable for that because they're the ones hosting these tweets the Google one was more about what stuff they promote in you know when it comes to algorithms so if you go onto YouTube several days in a row and you've logged in you will notice that it starts recommending stuff to you based on what you've watched in the past and so their algorithms are trying to find stuff they think you will like and there's some people out there who say yeah but if it's promoting the wrong stuff they shouldn't be allowed to do that or they shouldn't be allowed to do that without being held accountable so the Twitter decision was unanimous uh and Thomas wrote the opinion and he said that social media platforms are a little different from other digital Technologies it might be that bad actors are able to use platforms like defendants for illegal and sometimes terrible ends he wrote but the same could be said of cell phones email or the internet generally and and he's correct his opinion reflected the Court's struggle to identify during oral arguments what kinds of speech ought to trigger liability for social media and what kind of speech deserve protection because really all of this stuff is a form of speech okay the the algorithm is not so much um but obviously tweets are speech right it's just written as opposed to oral I think the court recognized the importance of these platforms for billions of people for communicating and step back from interfering with that says the vice president of policy at the center for democracy and Technology uh one of the groups that filed the brief in this case for months many legal experts have viewed the Twitter and Google cases as a sign that the court might seek sweeping changes to section 230 a law that has faced bipartisan criticism in connection with tech companies content moderation decisions Thomas in particular has expressed vocal interest in hearing a section 230 case expectations of a hugely disruptive outcome in both cases prompted what Kate Clinic a law professor St John's described as an insane flood of Friend of the Court briefs as oral arguments unfolded however and as Justice is visibly grappled with the complexities of Internet speech the likelihood of massive changes to the law seemed to go away I think it slowly started to creep into the realm of possibility that maybe the court has no idea what the hell these cases are about and had maybe picked them to be activists but weren't ready to be this activist clonic tweeted and that's ironic that she tweeted her response on this case Daphne Keller director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford agreed I do think this vindicates all of us who are saying the Supreme Court took the wrong case these ones did not present the issues they actually wanted and keep in mind that people file and try to get their cases heard by the Supreme Court so they request the court to hear their cases and the court turns down the vast majority of them and quite often when they accept one people go oh this is one they're going to actually weigh in on and and do something about but sometimes they step in and literally just uphold the lower court and so now there's precedent across the whole country that would have been only from one circuit perhaps before the justices May soon have another opportunity to weigh in on social media the court is still deciding whether to hear a number of cases dealing with the constitutionality of state laws passed by Texas and Florida that restrict online platforms ability to moderate content but the Court's handling of the Twitter and Google cases suggests the court may approach any new cases carefully and that's another argument I've heard this one before because there have been cases from the Supreme Court in other courts in the past where there are things that would appear to be privately owned such as a mall okay so somebody owns a mall a developer builds a mall there's stores there and obviously developer owns the mall inside the mall there might be a common area that people can walk through and people are encouraged to come in and walk around in there go shopping eat some food hang out with their friends their teenagers hang out with their friends and uh you know that's that's what that area is for inside the mall and they've had situations before where a mall has said uh you cannot come in here and start handing out like leaflets for instance we don't want that kind of activity in the mall because we think it might disturb our patrons and there have been cases where the courts have said despite the fact that's private property uh you kind of created this quasi-public Square inside the mall and so you kind of got to let people do things in there that they can do in public despite the fact it's private and it's one of those rulings that you can read it and go I can kind of see both sides on this so there are people who then say well if that's true doesn't that make a platform like Twitter or YouTube or a bulletin board the same kind of thing yeah Twitter's privately owned we know all about the guy who bought it right Twitter's privately owned but because of what they've done and accomplished they've kind of become one of the major town squares that people go to to either voice their opinions or see what other people's opinions are and so do they have the right to shut down anybody they want or to push other people to the Forefront that they like and that's the debate that's the debate okay the very fact that the justices are proceeding cautiously is a good sign and suggests a more nuanced understanding said Evelyn dewick an assistant professor at Stanford in Thursday's Twitter decision the courthouse that Twitter is hosting a general terrorist speech does not create legal responsibility for specific terrorist attacks effectively raising the bar for future claims we conclude Thomas wrote that plaintiff's allegations are insufficient to establish that these defendants aided and abetted in carrying out the attack he stressed the plaintiffs have failed to allege that defendants intentionally provided substantial Aid nor did they pervasively and systemically assist the terrorists in a way that would render them liable for every attack made by them now the Twitter case focused on whether social media companies can be sued under U.S anti-terrorism laws for hosting Terror related content that only has a distant relationship with a specific terrorist attack the plaintiffs in the case uh the families of a victim uh who died in 2017 alleged that the social media companies including Twitter had knowingly aided in violation of federal anti-terrorism laws now the Google case I guess that's a little different in a brief order the court dismissed the case against Google with only a short opinion leaving intact Lower Court ruling held that Google is immune from a lawsuit that accuses its subsidiary YouTube of aiding and abetting terrorism outcome will likely come as a relief not only for Google but for the many websites and social media companies that urge the Supreme Court not to cut back on the legal protections for the internet the opinion was unsigned and the court said we declined to address address the application of section 230 to a complaint that appears to State little if any plausible claim for Relief instead we vacate the Judgment below and remand the case for ninth circuit to consider plaintiff's complaint in light of our decision in Twitter so basically saying look to the Google case because that's the same result uh no dissents were noted that case involved Google and zeroed in a weather it can be sued because of YouTube's algorithms promoting certain videos on its platform the family of a victim of a terror attack in Paris alleged that YouTube's targeted recommendations violated the U.S anti-terrorism law by helping to radicalize viewers and promote the world view of the group behind the attack so it goes on a little more but this was a case that was widely widely discussed because of what could have happened what could have happened and so one of the things I always encourage people to do when you're thinking about something like this okay so you got your Twitter and you got your YouTube comment section or that's the first case the second case is the YouTube and their algorithms of which videos they push to different people and if you say okay Steve let's suppose the Supreme Court had gone the exact opposite way than they did in this case exact opposite well it would put people out of business who have websites that allow commentary uh right away you just shut the comments off and so the ability to comment on videos on YouTube would go away under the first case likewise Twitter would be forced to they can't shut the comments off because that's all they are is comments uh they'd be forced to put in extremely Draconian filters to edit out what people are posting and so yeah you could go on there and say hey everybody I'm going out to lunch today and your Tweet would probably be fine but there'd be all kinds of other stuff going on where you'd post something and it would have to go through a series of bots and filters and so on to figure out whether or not it's appropriate and we all know what would happen sooner or later something would get through uh and then they'd get sued and the question is how many lawsuits like that would they withstand before they said this isn't worth it but the algorithms on YouTube um is is to me such a a different situation because I can go on to YouTube and I log in and I I go to my home page it just says our recommendations for you right and it posts a bunch of stuff I've watched more than once so for instance I routinely go there and watch music videos I actually listen to them while I'm working or something and so there's some song I've listened to a bunch of times it'll say do you want to listen to this song again in essence that's what it's saying when it puts it up on the screen but it'll put up other music by related artists and I've discovered so much music on YouTube that I didn't know existed because it said oh in essence it said you liked this video we bet you'll like this video and I can think of dozens of songs I've found that way that I had no idea existed I had no idea the band existed no idea the song existed and so for the two or three people who care song called Always the way by James Rayne of Australian crawl look it up it's a great song uh Worlds Away by strange Advance out of Toronto another song I never would have found never would have found had it not been for YouTube's algorithms Tama wipera the letter or his cover of shuna Lang's Soviet snow again never would have seen those videos had they not been recommended to me by YouTube figuring out I'd like to see those videos and it's not just doing for music videos uh it's figured out that I'd like to watch World War II documentaries okay there's a couple other things that I like to watch and so it recommends these things to me and so I know you're gonna say but Steve these people are suggesting that people go onto YouTube and watch like Pro terrorist videos and YouTube keeps recommending them Pro terrorist videos and now here's the point I need to make here not all speech is popular and some people said when Google and YouTube promote a video that is them speaking in essence saying here's a good video watch this video and if you want them to censor that and say they cannot promote this one kind of video you and I both know what's going to happen people out there and say we'd really like it if you didn't promote this kind of video either or what about this kind of video and and you really shouldn't promote this video here and one of the kinds of videos I've watched before quite a few times car chase videos because in Los Angeles the news station's helicopter is really good at getting involved in car chases where they film them from above or a lot of people will actually foia request the in-car video of a car chase and they post it on the internet now the question is if you saw a bunch of car chase videos might that not encourage you to run the next time the cop tries pulling you over I mean an argument can be made that if you see enough car chase videos one day you might try it I've I've heard that argument made before that if you saw enough of something eventually you might try it now I'm not saying that's true but people will make the argument so should they not recommend the car chase videos and by the way even they don't recommend the video maybe they shouldn't host it at all what are they doing the holistic terrorist videos what are they doing hosting car chase videos what are they doing hosting any other video that contains some kind of content that might encourage someone to do something wrong and so you get into that slippery slope argument about speech and we hold the freedom of speech to be an extremely vital and important part of our society and so I am one of the people who's on the side airing towards the side of let's censor speech less rather than more if we have to make a choice between the two and um there you go so the Supreme Courts ruled on this and they sidestepped the issue on Google but basically said read the Twitter ruling and you'll see what we're getting at and so hosting the information or promoting information with your algorithms is not going to create legal liability for you and I know some people are in a comment and go Steve you know something I I think the court got this wrong and if you post that in a comment to my video understand that if the court had gone the other way you wouldn't be allowed to post that comment because the comment section will be shut down and I'm not exaggerating because understand the Supreme Court is the final Arbiter on this meaning that no you can't appeal this you you can't you you can't take the Supreme Court higher so the Supreme Court had ruled on Thursday you guys are liable for Stuff posted underneath your videos and posted on your Twitter platform comments would have been shut off in many places twitter'd have to find a workaround they wanted to continue existing but trust me I believe this is a good opinion so there you go a bunch of people sent to me including Austin thank you very much uh that version was from CNN Brian Fung wrote it Supreme Court Shields Twitter from liability and leaves section 230 untouched questions your comments put them below let's talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching Leto's law a heart kind and an open mind are the best traveling companions

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 418,401

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: 2EzX_RdpJlY

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023