The US judiciary has accused Twitter of turning a blind eye to online actions by the jihadist group IS during a hearing at the Supreme Court. That court must decide whether the company can be charged with conspiracy in terrorist acts.
“There is an allegation of deliberate blindness here. You knew IS was using your platform,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor told a lawyer representing Twitter.
The nine judges of the US Supreme Court heard the complaint filed by the relatives of a victim of an IS attack in an Istanbul nightclub in 2017. The family argues that Twitter is complicit in the act of terror because it failed to remove or no longer recommend tweets through its algorithms.
Twitter receives support from its competitors, such as Google and Facebook. However, the company emphasizes that the service is used by tens of millions of people worldwide, which does not prove that it is knowingly helping terror groups.
A similar hearing followed on Tuesday; here it was about the family of a victim of the Paris terror attacks in 2015. There, the family accuses YouTube of supporting the growth of IS by automatically suggesting videos of the group.
