Twitter terrorism case comes down to a clunky a war of words
If Tuesday’s arguments were defined by their dramatically wide scope, the Wednesday arguments concerning Twitter v. Taamneh were almost completely the opposite. That case focuses on a 2017 lawsuit filed by the relatives of Nawras Alassaf who died following an ISIS attack that left 39 people dead. Lawyers representing Alassaf’s relatives tried to convince the justices that social media companies’ failure to remove suspected ISIS content qualifies as aiding and abetting terrorists and runs afoul of the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Whether or not that winds up ringing true will rely largely on incredibly tedious, nuanced textual interpretations of laws from lawyers on all sides of the argument. A lawyer representing Twitter spent much of the day Wednesday debating with justices over particular phrasings in past legal decisions and tried to draw distinction between Twitter actively aiding terrorists and potentially aiding them by failing to remove all of their content.
