Unanimous Supreme Court ruling protects website owners from liability of user posts
Unanimous Supreme Court ruling protects website owners from liability of user posts
www.nytimes.com Supreme Court Won’t Hold Tech Companies Liable for User Posts
The justices ruled in one case that a law allowing suits for aiding terrorism did not apply to the ordinary activities of social media companies.
An excellent decision. If it had gone the other way we likely would have seen social media websites shutdown entirely and comments disabled from YouTube. This also would have directly affected anyone in the U.S. that wanted to run an instance of Lemmy (or any federated instance that users could post content on).
The rulings were in regards to Section 230 which was a law passed in 1996 aimed at protecting services which allow users to post their own content.
The supreme court tackled 2 different cases concerning this:
- Whether social media platforms can be held liable for what their users have said.
- This was very specific to whether algorithms that refer tailored content to individual users can cause companies to be considered as knowingly aiding and abetting terrorists (if their pro-terrorist content is referred to other users).
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