Federal Judge: First Amendment Protects Internet Search Results

Alison Frankel reports for Thomson Reuters:

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan grabbed the chance Thursday to set precedent on a question that has received surprisingly little attention in the courts: Does the First Amendment’s protection of free speech extend to the results of Internet searches? Furman was clearly captivated by the issue as an intellectual challenge, delving into the vigorous academic discussion of the First Amendment and Internet search even deeper than the two sides in the case, the Chinese search engine Baidu and the activists who sued the site for supposedly violating their civil rights by blocking their pro-democracy works from appearing in search results. In a supersmart opinion that Furman seems to have written to be widely read, the judge concluded that when search engines exercise editorial judgment – even if that judgment is just algorithms that determine how results will be listed – they are entitled to free speech protection.

That protection, he said, is quite broad in scope. “There is a strong argument to be made that the First Amendment fully immunizes search-engine results from most, if not all, kinds of civil liability and government regulation,” Furman wrote. “The central purpose of a search engine is to retrieve relevant information from the vast universe of data on the Internet and to organize it in a way that would be most helpful to the searcher. In doing so, search engines inevitably make editorial judgments about what information (or kinds of information) to include in the results and how and where to display that information (for example, on the first page of the search results or later).”

The judge said U.S. Supreme Court precedent on the First Amendment “all but compels” his conclusion. The plaintiffs in the Baidu case are New York residents accusing the search engine of suppressing their political speech at the behest of the Chinese government. Those allegations, Furman wrote, necessarily imply that Baidu is exercising editorial judgment. So the search engine, he said, is no different from a newspaper editor deciding what stories to run, a guidebook writer picking which events to highlight or Matt Drudge making judgments “about which stories to link and how prominently to feature them.” And though it might seem counterintuitive that the right of free speech would protect editorial judgments to squelch free speech, Furman said that’s the point of the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment protects Baidu’s right to advocate for systems of government other than democracy (in China or elsewhere) just as surely as it protects Plaintiffs’ rights to advocate for democracy,” he wrote.