Father of a Paris Attack Victim Sues Facebook, Twitter and Google

Reynaldo Gonzalez has accused the sites of providing material support to the extremists.

A person being evacuated after a shooting outside the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015. (Photo: AP)

The father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre in November 2015 is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, claiming that the companies provided “material support” to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks, filed the suit on Tuesday in the US District Court in the northern district of California.

The suit claims that the companies “knowingly permitted” ISIS to recruit members, raise money and spread “extremist propaganda” via their social-media services.

Facebook and Twitter said the Gonzalez lawsuit has no merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material in their statements.

Twitter, for instance, said that it has “teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate.”

Facebook’s statement read, in part, that if the company sees “evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement.”

[Google has] clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly removes videos violating these policies when flagged by our users.

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal “safe harbour” for companies like Twitter and Facebook; it states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

However, Ari Kresch, a lawyer from Gonzalez’s legal team said in an email that the lawsuit targets social media companies because of the behaviour they enabled, not what they published.

This complaint is not about what ISIS’s messages say. It is about Google, Twitter, and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations.

The Gonzales complaint also alleges that Google’s YouTube shared revenue with ISIS from ads that ran with its videos.

This is not the first time that a terror victim’s relative has sued these platforms. In January, a widow of a contractor killed in an attack in Jordan sued Twitter.

Both suits have numerous identical passages and screenshots, although the lawyers in the cases are different.