Revived Lawsuit Says Twitter DMs Are Like Handing ISIS a Satellite Phone (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A long-standing lawsuit holding Twitter responsible for the rise of ISIS got new life today, as plaintiffs filed a revised version of the complaint (PDF) that was struck down earlier this month. In the new complaint, the plaintiffs argue Twitter's Direct Message service is akin to providing ISIS with physical communications equipment like a radio or a satellite phone. The latest complaint is largely the same as the one filed in January, but a few crucial differences will be at the center of the court's response. The plaintiffs also offer new arguments for why Twitter might be held responsible for the attack. In the dismissal earlier this month (PDF), District Judge William Orrick faulted the plaintiffs for not articulating a case for why providing access to Twitter's services constituted material aid to ISIS. "Apart from the private nature of Direct Messaging, plaintiffs identify no other way in which their Direct Messaging theory seeks to treat Twitter as anything other than a publisher of information provided by another information content provider," the ruling reads. At the same time, the judge found that the privacy of those direct messages "does not remove the transmission of such messages from the scope of publishing activity." The new complaint includes some language that might address that concern, explicitly comparing Twitter to other material communication tools. "Giving ISIS the capability to send and receive Direct Messages in this manner is no different than handing it a satellite phone, walkie-talkies or the use of a mail drop," the new complaint reads, "all of which terrorists use for private communications in order to further their extremist agendas." The Safe Harbor clause has been used in the past to protect service providers from liability for hosting data on their network. However, "Brookings Institute scholar Benjamin Witters argued against protecting Twitter under the Safe Harbor clause, claiming that the current reasoning would also protect companies that actively offer services in support of terrorists."

Comments

Consistency

[Kunedog]

Twitter itself buys into (through their vague ToS and uneven/biased enforcement) arguments equating disagreement with harassment, and criticism with threats. And it throws even those stances out the window when the "harassing" party aligns with the right politics. Their Trust and Safety Council contains known harassers and doxxers.

If Twitter consistently took up a principled position to protect free speech (instead of cracking down on political thoughtcrime at the drop of a hat), they'd be in a much better position to resist this.

So sue the makers of walkie-talkies then!

[Anonymous Coward]

If ISIS using Twitter is no different to ISIS using a satellite phone, walkie talkies etc, ""all of which terrorists use for private communications in order to further their extremist agendas." then why aren't the creators of those devices involved in this litigation?

Re: So sue the makers of walkie-talkies then!

[dfeifer]

They could also use a private team speak / ventrilo / etc. server but I would hazard a guess that most of it is done via throw away cell phones.. so let's take away Mobil phones from everyone? Really this whole speiel sounds a lot like the whole " gateway drug" dispute.

Re:So sue the makers of walkie-talkies then!

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter has demonstrated the ability and the will to censor or ban users they do not like for speech they find unacceptable. They have failed to ban ISIS members and have failed to censor them, therefore they find ISIS acceptable.

Re: So sue the makers of walkie-talkies then!

[flopsquad]

Mobil phones

Sound like pretty crude devices to me. *ducks*

Other IM services

[Eristone]

So they hold Twitter responsible, but not Skype (Microsoft), Yahoo, AOL, or any of the other companies that offer IM-type or bulletin board type services where information can be passed? Hell - with a little planning, a Wikipedia article edit could be used as a communication channel, not to mention the talk portion where editing an article is discussed. Or even Slashdot - read at -1 and find your messages for the Kettle Run on the next anniversary.

Stop with the hysteria

[PopeRatzo]

ISIS (and other terrorist groups) killed 19 Americans last year. Total. Cops killed 1,125 Americans last year (it's actually a higher number, since the US gov't doesn't keep track of Americans killed by cops).

Americans with guns killed over 35,000 Americans last year.

But ISIS is used as the excuse to take away people's rights.

Re:Stop with the hysteria

[bluefoxlucid]

So our police force has a serious problem with being an enforcement division rather than a peace-keeping division, when it's supposed to be a peace-keeping division. Police have stopped using discretion and working to maintain peace and order, and have become authoritarian in nature; this has changed them from a pillar of stability in the community to a perceived threat, and leads to an increase in violent reaction to police presence, and a general increase in crime due to a perception that the police force and thus the law in general is an antagonizing agent and thus the enemy.

Yours and many others's response is, apparently, "Well we need police, so nothing is wrong."

This stance is similar to telling people water is necessary for life when they complain somebody took a shit in their drinking supply.

Re:Stop with the hysteria

[bluefoxlucid]

It's funny, heart disease is trivial. Human metabolism produces Vitamin C through a four-step process, and a misconfigured gene causes the fourth step to fail. Because of this, food scarcity several tens of thousands of years ago caused death by leaking arteries due to a lack of Vitamin C intake; a mutation which causes the deposit of cholesterol on the arterial walls enabled survival by patching the holes in rotting arteries. We can fix this permanently using modern gene therapy to edit each embryo so as to correct the single Vitamin C gene, and then following up three generations later with an edit to remove cholesterol build-up entirely.

The Vitamin C edit is relatively-cheap now (gene therapy on embryos is new in the market, and not dirt-cheap), and in less than ten years will be feasible as an international humanitarian program offered to any who want to ensure a healthy, permanent Vitamin C supplementation in their children and grandchildren. By the time it's reasonable to remove heart disease, gene therapy technology will have developed such that the edit is trivial. That means this is the last century in which anyone needs to be born with the threat of heart disease.

Of course, that kind of tinkering with human DNA is unethical. It would be wrong to minimize suffering and death.