Next week the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Gonzalez v Google, a case addressing YouTube’s alleged liability for hosting and directing users to videos posted by the terrorist organization ISIS. The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, one of more than 100 victims of an ISIS terrorist attack, claim that those who murdered Nohemi had used ISIS-posted videos on YouTube.
Conventional wisdom and lower courts have held that the Gonzalez family must lose under American law for the following reasons: (1) Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act of 1996 provides blanket immunity from liability to websites for posting user-generated content; (2) it is physically impossible for websites such as YouTube to be responsible for the content of millions of hours of videos updated daily; and (3) the American economy would suffer substantial harm if Google and YouTube were liable.
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