Judge Dumps Two Lawsuits Attempting To Hold Facebook Responsible For Acts Of Terrorism

Legal Issues

from the not-how-this-works dept

Two lawsuits filed by victims of terrorist attacks against Facebook have been dismissed. Both suits alleged Facebook was complicit in acts of terrorism simply because it (subjectively) didn’t do enough to discourage use of the platform by alleged terrorists.

One lawsuit (Cohen v. Facebook) plead on behalf of “20,000 similarly-situated” residents of Israel who continue to face the threat of violence at the hands of terrorist organization Hamas. The other (Force v. Facebook) also featured multiple plaintiffs but was limited to families of victims of Hamas attacks. Neither case presented legitimate complaints and both advanced novel arguments in an attempt to avoid a dismissal under Section 230.

The alternative routes to judgment worked out no better for the plaintiffs, as Eric Goldman reports. The Cohen class action presented a legal theory that couldn’t even be addressed by the court due to a lack of jurisdiction. From the decision [PDF]:

the Cohen Plaintiffs do not seek redress for past actions but instead seek prospective, injunctiye relief based on their allegation that Facebook’s actions increase their risk of harm from future terrorist attacks. This claimed harm relies on multiple conjectural leaps, most significantly its central assumption that the Cohen Plaintiffs will be among the victims of an as-yet unknown terrorist attack by independent actors not before the court. The Cohen Complaint contains no factual allegation that could form a basis to conclude that those individuals in particular are at any “substantial” or “certainly impending” risk of future harm. At most, the Complaint shows a general risk of harm to residents of Israel and impliedly asks the court to extract a risk of harm to the Cohen Plaintiffs based on this risk. Without further allegations, however, the court sees no basis to conclude that the Cohen Plaintiffs “specifically will be the target of any future, let alone imminent, terrorist attack.”

Nor can the Cohen Plaintiffs rescue their claims by arguing that they suffer a present harm resulting from their fear of such attacks, as “allegations of a subjective [fear] are not an adequate substitute for a claim of specific present objective harm or threat of a specific future harm.” While the court does not question the sincerity of the Cohen Plaintiffs’ anxieties, their subjective fears cannot confer standing absent a sufficient showing of the risk of future harm.

The Force plaintiffs did not entirely avoid a Section 230 argument, but posited the immunity does not apply to content posted outside of the United States. The court grants that this legal theory is mostly unexplored at this point, but that the plaintiffs cannot avail themselves of an extraterritorial-reliant legal theory while bringing legal action in a US court against a US-based company.

In light of its focus on limiting civil liability, the court concludes that the relevant location is that where the grant of immunity is applied, i.e. the situs of the litigation. Section 230(c)(1) suggests a number of “territorial relationships and events,” which are generally divisible into those associated with the underlying claim (e.g., the location of the information content provider, the intemet service provider, or the act of publishing or speaking) and the location associated with the imposition of liability, i.e. where the intemet service provider is to be “treated” as the publisher or speaker. Given the statutory focus on limiting liability, however, the location of the relevant “territorial events” or “relationships” cannot be the place in which the claims arise but instead must be where redress is sought and immunity is needed.

With this in mind, the court concludes that the Force Action does not require an impermissible extraterritorial application of Section 230(c)(1). As the situs of the litigation is New York, the relevant “territorial events or relationships” occur domestically. Accordingly, the court rejects the Force Plaintiffs argument that Facebook should be denied immunity under Section 230(c)(1).

As Goldman points out, this looks like a routine and logical application of Section 230 immunity, but if arguments like these are entertained in other courts, it could pose some serious, irreparable problems for social media platforms.

The plaintiffs essentially sought to treat Facebook as the financial guarantor of all terrorist-caused harms to all victims, regardless of what role Facebook played in causing those harms. Such an unbounded financial exposure could dwarf Facebook’s market capitalization, meaning that the theories behind these lawsuits pose an existential threat to Facebook, other social media sites, and possibly the entire Internet. Thus, the judge’s well-reasoned and clear rejection of the plaintiff’s claim is a big win for Facebook and the Internet.

This decision will be appealed by both parties. There’s been no decision yet on a similar suit filed in the Ninth Circuit, but the chances of these legal theories succeeding is very slim. But it’s not impossible to end up with a bad ruling or, at the very least, precedent that weakens Section 230 without removing it completely. We’ve seen it happen before. But so far courts haven’t felt the urge to hold social media platforms directly responsible for terrorists’ acts of violence and it’s unlikely these two complainants are going to change that.

Filed Under: intermediary liability, liability, material support for terrorism, terrorism
Companies: facebook