The leftist Big Tech overlords may finally face a day of reckoning as the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Section 230 law that governs how tech platforms moderate free speech.
SCOTUSblog tweeted Oct. 3 that SCOTUS granted a writ of certiorari to Gonzalez v. Google, “involving the scope of tech companies' immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.”
USA Today summarized that the case will have “potentially enormous consequences for social media.” It is the “court’s first test of the broad immunity social media companies have enjoyed under a provision known as Section 230, part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act,” Bloomberg News reported.
Then came the typical liberal media “Republicans Pounce” angle from Bloomberg: “Section 230 has become a target of conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, who say it lets left-leaning tech companies censor right-wing voices.”
NEW: SCOTUS agrees to take up NINE new cases, including Gonzalez v. Google, involving the scope of tech companies' immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The order list is not yet posted on the court's website, but here is a link: https://t.co/15KDnQUL2R
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) October 3, 2022
SCOTUS’s forthcoming decision comes after two lower appeals courts “sided with Google and said the lawsuit should be dismissed,” said Bloomberg News.
The sobering context behind the Gonzalez case goes back seven years, according to USA Today:
Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, was killed in an ISIS attack in Paris in 2015. Her family sued Google, alleging it was partly responsible because it promoted videos and other content from ISIS that propagated the group’s message. The question in the case is whether Google is entitled to Section 230 protections when it recommends content to other users, even when that process is handled by an algorithm.
Google fretted in a brief to SCOTUS filed July 5 opposing the high court taking up the case: “This Court should not lightly adopt a reading of section 230 that would threaten the basic organizational decisions of the modern internet.” SCOTUS clearly didn’t find Google’s alarmism too convincing.
Google is notorious for its sordid record of manipulating objectionable content. Just recently, the company finally allowed pro-free speech platform Parler back on the Google Play Store after banning it for nearly two years. Recent revelations showed that the Orwellian Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actively coordinated with social media companies and Google “to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Thirty-five pages of documents reportedly shared by America First Legal with the Free Beacon indicated “CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over ‘vaccine misinformation.’”
One piece of correspondence, appearing to be from CDC health communications specialist Elisabeth Wilhelm and written to Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab leader for the Asia-Pacific region, called for employees like Google product policy team manager Alexios Mantzarlis to become — wait for it — “infodemic manager unicorns.”
“I urge them to apply—we need diversity of experiences and skills to successfully combat the waves of misinformation that a new COVID-19 vaccines [sic] or vaccines will bring about,” Wilhelm wrote.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
