Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1496_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 10.0

4 

TWITTER, INC. v. TAAMNEH 

Opinion of the Court 

YouTube, 510,000 comments are posted on Facebook, and 
347,000  tweets  are  sent  on  Twitter.    See  Statista,  Media 
Usage  in  an  Internet  Minute  as  of  April  2022  (2023), 
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195140/new-user-
generated-content-uploaded-by-users-per-minute; Statista,
YouTube–Statistics & Facts; B. Marr, How Much Data Do 
We Create Every Day? Forbes, May 21, 2018.  On YouTube 
alone, users collectively watch more than 1 billion hours of 
video  every  day.  See  YouTube  Advertising,  Reach  Your 
Customers—and Discover New Ones, https://youtube.com/
intl/en_us/ads/how-it-works/set-up-a-campaign/audience.

Defendants profit from this content largely by charging
third parties to advertise on their platforms.  Those adver-
tisements are placed on or near the billions of videos, posts, 
comments, and tweets uploaded by the platforms’ users.  To 
organize and present all those advertisements and pieces of
content,  defendants  have  developed  “recommendation”  al-
gorithms  that  automatically  match  advertisements  and 
content with each user; the algorithms generate those out-
puts based on a wide range of information about the user,
the  advertisement,  and  the  content  being  viewed.    So,  for 
example, a person who watches cooking shows on YouTube 
is  more  likely  to  see  cooking-based  videos  and  advertise-
ments for cookbooks, whereas someone who likes to watch 
professorial  lectures  might  see  collegiate  debates  and  ad-
vertisements for TED Talks. 

But not all of the content on defendants’ platforms is so 
benign.  As  plaintiffs  allege,  ISIS  and  its  adherents  have
used these platforms for years as tools for recruiting, fund-
raising, and spreading their propaganda.  Like many others
around the world, ISIS and its supporters opened accounts 
on  Facebook,  YouTube,  and  Twitter  and  uploaded  videos
and messages for others to see.  Like most other content on 
those  platforms,  ISIS’  videos  and  messages  were  then
matched with other users based on those users’ information