This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 8th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown. A case going before the US Supreme Court aims to answer some

questions about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Specifically, when an algorithm serves you a suggested video, can the providers of those videos

be held liable for what happens afterward? Cato's Tommy Berry discusses the case and what it might mean for freedom and accountability

on the internet.

This is a highly fraught issue and it has scrambled a lot of sort of traditional ideas about what individuals should be allowed to say,

what companies ought to be able to do, what those associations ought to be. What is this case about with

respect to Section 230?

So this case is a little bit different from any Section 230 case we've seen before. Typically fights over Section 230

are about whether websites have immunity for things that they host, for the mere

fact that they're hosting it. This is a lawsuit raising a new and different theory for why

Section 230 should not apply. This is a lawsuit claiming that algorithmic recommendations are not protected by

Section 230. So the specific facts of this case, the plaintiffs are relatives or victims of people in the 2015 Paris terrorist attack perpetrated by ISIS.

Their claim is that ISIS recruitment was aided and abetted by YouTube owned by Google

and that essentially, you know, we've all fallen into that YouTube rabbit hole where

you watch one video and then you see it, five more videos like it on the bar on the right.

The claim here is that you can fall into a dark rabbit hole if you start watching

radicalization videos and see more on the right. And so the claim is that essentially those

algorithms that put similar videos in the bar to the right of your screen is

essentially a recommendation by the website and that a recommendation is not protected by Section 230.

All right, so we're familiar, you and I are familiar with algorithms serving us content even on Facebook among our friends we don't

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