… Now spool forward to November 2015 when Nohemi Gonzalez, a young American studying in Paris, was gunned down in a restaurant by the Islamic State terrorists who murdered 129 other people that night. Her family sued Google, arguing that its YouTube subsidiary had used algorithms to push IS videos to impressionable viewers, using the information that the company had collected about them. Their petition seeking a supreme court review argues that “videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which IS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled”.
The key thing about the Gonzalez suit, though, is not that YouTube should not be hosting IS videos (section 230 allows that) but that its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms, which may push other, perhaps more radicalising, videos, renders it liable for the resulting damage. Or, to put it crudely, while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it does not – and should not – have protection for an algorithm that determines what they should view next.
Or bring free speech to its knees.
