The Supreme Court declined to address the legal liability shield that protects tech platforms from being held responsible for their users’ posts, the court said in an unsigned opinion Thursday.
The decision leaves in place, for now, a broad liability shield that protects companies like Twitter, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube from being held liable for their users’ speech on their platforms.
The court’s decisions in these cases will serve as a big sigh of relief for tech platforms for now, but many members of Congress are still itching to reform the legal liability shield.
In the case, Gonzalez v. Google, the court said it would “decline to address the application” of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects platforms from their users’ speech and also allows the services to moderate or remove users’ posts. The court said it made that decision because the complaint “appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief.”
