Supreme Court Sides with Big Tech Against Victims of Islamic Terrorism

Leftists hate the Supreme Court and want to destroy it, because it is the last bulwark preventing the full implementation of their anti-American and authoritarian agenda. Patriots likewise are relieved that the Court currently has enough Justices who respect the Constitution to prevent the total destruction of the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. But a recent Supreme Court ruling demonstrates that patriots’ hope that the Court will stop the Left from trampling upon all our freedoms may be ill-advised. The Court has just sided with Big Tech when it had a chance to force the social media giants to some accountability.

Jewish News Syndicate reported Sunday that the Supreme Court ruled against “the families of terrorism victims in two separate cases in which the plaintiffs accused Google, Twitter and Facebook of ‘aiding and abetting’ attacks by failing to block content promoting terrorism.” In the case of Twitter v. Taamneh, which was “brought by family members of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul,” the vote was unanimous. In the other case, Gonzalez v. Google, “the plaintiffs asserted that the companies were liable for the death of American college student Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a café during coordinated ISIS attacks in Paris in 2015.” That one was “sent back to a lower court.”

The Court’s unanimous decision in Twitter v. Taamneh and its refusal even to consider Gonzalez v. Google were ominous, as both cases featured plaintiffs who were contending that the social media giants hadn’t done enough to block jihad terrorist material on their platforms. JNS noted that these decisions “handed a victory to the tech industry by declining to weigh in on the foundational U.S. internet law known as Section 230.”

This is the notorious law that “protects online companies from liability for content posted by their users. It also gives internet companies the ability to remove content without liability.” The Court stated that Gonzalez v. Google “should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have a case under the Anti-Terrorism Act. It advised the lower court that there was no need to address Section 230.”

That was bad enough in itself, but it was even worse in light of the fact that Google, Twitter (both in its pre-Elon Musk days and to a lesser extent even now) and Facebook have systematically and relentlessly censored, blocked, banned and shadowbanned opponents of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, on the pretext that they’re purveying “hate speech.” The social media giants let jihadist material proliferate while moving ruthlessly to suppress material that opposed jihad violence, at the behest of the massively discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The real “hate speech” was the jihadist rhetoric and recruitment for which Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google were trying to hold the social media giants accountable. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an attorney for the Gonzalez family: “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge the dangers of Section 230’s blanket immunity for the social media platforms and their facilitation of these vital internet services to designated terrorist organizations….It is clearly understood that platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will never voluntarily act to self-regulate in any meaningful way that safeguards the lives of innocent people or protects the national security of the U.S. or other democratic states. The terror victims accuse the social media giants of knowingly providing their services to extremist groups like ISIS and Hezbollah.”

The social media giants didn’t just provide jihadis a platform while silencing foes of jihad. Back in February, the Jerusalem Post reported that a group called the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) had discovered that “Facebook created 108 pages for Islamic State in addition to dozens of other pages for terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda. These terrorist group pages were generated automatically as users listed the groups in their profiles or ‘checked in’ to terrorist organizations.” The Post added that “some of these automatically generated pages have been living on Facebook for years, racking up likes and posts with terrorist propaganda and imagery.”

All that was apparently just fine with Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook has acted swiftly and consistently to suppress the pages of groups such as my own Jihad Watch, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and innumerable others that dared to discuss the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism, and to speak up against the oppression of women and others under Islamic law.

Yet now the Supreme Court has given Facebook and its sinister colleagues a free hand to continue to distribute jihad terror material, and silence those who oppose it, without any accountability at all. Patriots should duly reevaluate their enthusiasm for the Judicial branch. It removed the cancer on the body politic that was Roe v. Wade, but it has a long way to go before it can be said that it stands consistently in defense of freedom.