Gonzalez vs Google: ‘Terrorism content has no place on YouTube’ – YouTube

Google owned YouTube has told The Citizen terrorism content has no place on the video platform.

This comes after the US Supreme Court announced it will hear Gonzalez versus Google, an extraordinarily high-stakes tech policy case on Monday.

ISIS attack

The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old US citizen studying in France was killed during a 2015 series of Islamic State or ISIS terror attacks in Paris, sued YouTube parent company Google, arguing the video sharing site not only provided a platform for videos containing terrorist content, but also recommended the videos to users.

Individuals affiliated with the terrorist group opened fire on a café where she and her friends were eating dinner.

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According to her family’s lawyers, she was one of 129 people killed during a November 2015 wave of violence in Paris that ISIS claimed responsibility for.

Algorithms

The Hill reports that the family alleges that YouTube algorithms allowed “hundreds of radicalising videos inciting violence and recruiting potential supporters” to be targeted to users of the platform.

A judge dismissed the case, and the family appealed to the Supreme Court. 

Supreme Court

The US’ highest court will decide whether social media companies can be sued for hosting and recommending terrorist content, taking up the two cases that challenge their liability protections.

YouTube response

Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson said content promoting terrorism does not have a place on YouTube.

“We’ve committed significant time and resources to establish the policies and systems that enable us to detect, remove and deter the spread of this harmful content, and continue to heavily invest in these ongoing efforts. We look forward to presenting our work to the Supreme Court.”

Cases

The cases mark 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.

The second case the Supreme Court agreed to hear, Twitter v. Taamneh, involves the 2017 death of Jordanian citizen Nawras Alassaf during an ISIS-affiliated attack in Istanbul, The Hill reported.

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