Source: https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebook-immune-liability-based-third-party-content
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 19:14:05+00:00

Document:
In an interesting examination of the role of social media platforms and terrorism, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York dismissed two related complaints against Facebook on Thursday, May 18. Each set of complainants had asserted similar claims: that “Facebook has supported terrorist organizations by allowing those groups and their members to use its social media platform to further their aims.” Last year on Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Zoe Bedell wrote about this case—in addition to a series of posts addressing the possibility of suing social media platforms as fostering terrorist organizations both in the abstract and practically, given a 2016 lawsuit against Twitter, Google, and Facebook filed for just that reason. Ultimately, the two concluded that though technology companies would claim immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230)—claims the two admit are strong—this defense “should probably not prevail under either the extensive extant § 230 case law or under the plain text of the statute itself.” District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York ultimately disagreed. This post lays out the case’s factual and procedural background as well as court’s opinion dismissing the suit.
As stated above, the court addressed two actions simultaneously: Cohen v. Facebook and Force v. Facebook.
Describing the Cohen Plaintiffs, the court quotes its complaint, stating they are “20,000 individuals residing in Israel who state that they ‘have been and continue to be targeted by’ attacks by Palestinian terrorist organizations.” These individuals claim to remain “‘threatened with imminent violent attacks that are planned, coordinated, directed, and/or incited by terrorist users of Facebook.’” The Force Plaintiffs, on the other hand, “are the estates of victims (and, in one case, the surviving victim) of past attacks by the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas and the family members of those victims,” in which every victim is an American and most of whom were living in Israel at the time of the attack.
The Cohen Plaintiffs filed their complaint in New York state court in August 2016, and Facebook removed the action to federal court. (Because it was filed in King’s County—better known as Brooklyn—it was removed to the Eastern District.) The Force complaint was filed in federal District Court in the Southern District of New York, only to be transferred across the Brooklyn Bridge as sufficiently related to the Cohen cause of action.
Facebook’s approach to addressing this use of the platform has been piecemeal (intermittently deleting individual postings or banning users) and inconsistent (e.g., deleting offending posts from one individual without removing identical messages or banning users without taking steps to ensure that the same person does not subsequently rejoin the website under a different moniker).
Judge Garaufis’s opinion is broken down into three parts: Subject Matter Jurisdiction and Standing; Personal Jurisdiction; and Failure to State a Claim. I explain each in turn.
Judge Garaufis begins his legal analysis with the court’s subject matter jurisdiction and the complainants’ standing. Put simply, the court writes, “[t]he Cohen Plaintiffs fail to carry their burden of showing that their claims are grounded in some non-speculative future harm.” Though the Cohen complaint offered “extensive descriptions” of previous attacks, “the Cohen Plaintiffs do not seek redress for past actions but instead seek prospective, injunctive relief based on their allegation that Facebook’s actions increase their risk of harm from future terrorist attacks.” However, the court finds that to get from their descriptions of past attacks to Facebook’s actions as enabling harms is a bridge too far; relying 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 complaint cannot meet the standard set forth by the Supreme Court that the Plaintiffs are at “substantial” or “certainly impending” risk of imminent harm. Instead, the court finds the logical connection could “[a]t most” show Facebook increasing the risk to Israel at large rather than the Plaintiffs specifically. Additionally, the court is unpersuaded by any argument that fear of future attack is a sufficient harm, under the standard set forth by the Supreme Court in Clapper v. Amnesty International. Therefore, the court dismissed the Cohen claim altogether for lack of standing.
Next, the court addresses questions of personal jurisdiction and rejects Facebook’s claim that the EDNY cannot assert personal jurisdiction over the company because of Facebook’s more than minimal contact with the district. Citing Licci v. Lebanese Canadian Bank, SAL, Judge Garaufis concludes that the court has personal jurisdiction over Facebook. Because the company received proper service of process, there was statutory basis for personal jurisdiction, and the court exercised jurisdiction “consistent with ‘constitutional due process principles.’” Facebook disputed the final two requirements.
To find a statutory basis for jurisdiction, the court looked to Weiss v. National Westminster Bank and Strauss et al. v. Credit Lyonnais, S.A.; both of these cases found a statutory basis in the service itself. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2334, “[p]rocess [for a federal antiterrorism cause pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2333] may be served in any district where the defendant resides, is found, or has an agent.” By permitting service of process nationwide, the Weiss and Strauss courts reasoned, the statute simultaneously creates a statutory basis for personal jurisdiction nationwide. Judge Garaufis was similarly persuaded by this reasoning, not to mention the precedential value of both cases.
As for due process considerations, the court deployed a “minimum contacts” analysis; however, it did so for the entire country rather than for the district because “satisfaction of due process as to federal statutes with nationwide service provisions depends only on a party's contact with the United States as a whole,” including specifically under the ATA. (Including Strauss, Weiss, and two other similar cases.) Facebook’s minimum contacts with the United States are beyond dispute.
Finally, the court exercised its discretion in choosing not to separate the Israeli law-based claims. According to Second Circuit precedent, so long as federal and non-federal claims “‘derive from a common nucleus of operative fact’, the district court may assert personal jurisdiction over the parties to the related . . . claims even if personal jurisdiction is not otherwise available.” Therefore, the district court has discretion to bifurcate the claims based on “considerations of juridical economy, convenience, and fairness to litigants.” Given the common nexus, the court forged ahead with the entirety of the Force complaint intact.
To discern the answer, the opinion first recounts the Second Circuit’s tripartite test for where § 230 applies: “if the defendant (1) is a provider or user of an interactive computer service, (2) the claim is based on information provided by another information content provider and (3) the claim would treat [the defendant] as the publisher or speaker of that information.” The Force Plaintiffs only object to the final necessary condition.
"At its core, § 230 bars 'lawsuits seeking to hold a service provider liable for its exercise of a publisher’s traditional editorial functions—such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter content'". . . . [W]hat matters is whether the cause of action inherently requires the court to treat the defendant as the "publisher or speaker" of content provided by another. To put it another way, courts must ask whether the duty that the plaintiff alleges the defendant violated derives from the defendant’s status or conduct as a "publisher or speaker."
This interpretation, in addition to analogous case law in both sister district courts and other courts, compels the court to determine “that Section 230(c)(1) is implicated not only by claims that explicitly point to third party content but also by claims which . . . implicitly require recourse to that content to establish liability or implicate a defendant’s role, broadly defined, in publishing or excluding third party communications.” This interpretation has also led other courts to conclude that, in Judge Garaufis’s words, “decisions as to whether existing content should be removed” as well as the “structure and operation” of a website are editorial functions that fall under § 230(c)(1)’s protection. In one case, that has been “extended to a social media platform's decisions as to who may obtain an account.” (See Fields v. Twitter, No. 16-CV-213, 2016 WL 6822065, at *6) (N.D. Cal. Nov. 18, 2016)).
The Force complaint attempts to artfully plead so as to avoid § 230’s bar, arguing that Facebook should be held liable for permitting users with connection to Hamas to join the social media platform and for failing to excise these hateful accounts, but to no avail. Judge Garaufis parries these claims by stating they constitute a distinction without a difference: “Facebook’s choices as to who may use its platform are inherently bound up in its decisions as to what may be said on its platform, and so liability imposed based on its failure to remove users would equally ‘derive from [Facebook’s] status or conduct as a ‘publisher or speaker.’’” What’s more, because the complaint alleges that Facebook’s platform is an integral part of the necessary causal inference—Facebook contributed to the Plaintiffs’ harms by allowing Hamas to post content that recruited more terrorists and incited more malevolent acts—it would be impossible to simultaneously harm the Plaintiffs while not retaining the role of an editor or publisher. Therefore, the court concludes that §230(c)(1)’s immunity applies domestically. But does it apply extraterritorially? The short answer is no; the long answer is far more nuanced.
Here’s the important part, however: whether the statute applies extraterritorially is not actually relevant. Rather we must ask if the grant of immunity applies to the case. That answer, the court concludes, is that it does. §230(c)(1) puts forward myriad “territorial relationships and events,” primarily divided into two categories: those associated with the underlying claim (in this case, abroad) and those associated with the suit (where the defendant is acting as a publisher). But the court reasons that, “[g]iven the statutory focus on limiting liability, 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.” Therefore, §230(c)(1) nevertheless applies, which necessarily means that the Force Plaintiffs failed to state a claim and cannot survive a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.
For all the reasons Ben and Zoe laid out in their earlier posts, this case presented a potential opportunity to dramatically strengthen civil remedies for material support for terrorism allegations, putting the pressure on technology companies to take a much more active role in policing their content. As Ben and Zoe correctly noted, this complaint was “significantly more sophisticated than the earlier suits,” offering a much stronger case to survive motions to dismiss on challenges of proximate cause. But as the courts in this case and the other analogous cases cited above continue to apply the §230(c)(1) grant of immunity, it grows increasingly unlikely that any case against a service provider can actually break through the §230 wall.

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