Supreme Court justices in Google case express hesitation about upending Section 230
People wait in line outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on February 21, 2023 to hear oral arguments in two cases that test Section 230, the law that provides tech companies a legal shield over what their users post online.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Supreme Court Justices voiced hesitation on Tuesday about upending a key legal shield that protects tech companies from liability for their users’ posts, and for how the companies moderate messages on their sites.
Justices across the ideological spectrum expressed concern with breaking the delicate balance set by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as they rule on the pivotal case, Gonzalez v. Google, even as some suggested a narrower reading of the liability shield could sometimes make sense.
The current case was brought by the family of an American killed in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. The petitioners argue that Google, through its subsidiary YouTube, violated the Anti-Terrorism Act by aiding and abetting ISIS, as it promoted the group’s videos through its recommendation algorithm. Lower courts sided with Google, saying Section 230 protects the company from being held liable for third-party content posted on its service.
The petitioners contend that YouTube’s recommendations actually constitute the company’s own speech, which would fall outside the bounds of the liability shield.
But the justices struggled to understand where the petitioner’s counsel, Eric Schnapper, was drawing the line on what counts as content created by YouTube itself.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito at one point said he was “completely confused” by the distinction Schnapper tried to draw between YouTube’s own speech and that of a third party.
Schnapper repeatedly pointed to the thumbnail image YouTube shows users to display what video is coming up next, or is suggested based on their views. He said that thumbnail was a joint creation between YouTube and the third party that posted the video, in this case ISIS, because YouTube contributes the URL.
But several justices questioned whether that argument would apply to any attempt to organize information from the internet, including a search engine results page. They expressed concern that such a broad interpretation could have far-reaching effects the high court may not be prepared to predict.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that courts have applied Section 230 consistently since its inception in the 1990s and pointed to the amici briefs that warned overhauling that interpretation would cause massive economic consequences for many businesses, as well as their workers, consumers and investors. Kavanaugh said those are “serious concerns” Congress could consider if it sought to rework the statute. But the Supreme Court, he said, is “not equipped to account for that.”
“You’re asking us right now to make a very precise predictive judgment that ‘Don’t worry, that it’s really not going to be that bad,'” Kavanaugh told U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, who was arguing the high court should send the case back to the lower court for further consideration. “I don’t know that that’s at all the case. And I don’t know how we can assess that in any meaningful way.”
When Stewart suggested that Congress could amend 230 to account for changes in the reality of the internet today, Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back, noting “the amici suggests that if we wait for Congress to make that choice, the internet will be sunk.”
Even conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who has openly written that the court should take up a case around Section 230, seemed skeptical of the petitioners’ line in the sand. Thomas noted that YouTube uses the same algorithm to recommend ISIS videos to users interested in that kind of content, as it uses to promote cooking videos to those interested in that subject. Plus, he said, he sees those as suggestions, not affirmative recommendations.
“I don’t understand how a neutral suggestion about something that you’ve expressed an interest in is aiding and abetting,” Thomas said.
The justices had tough questions for Google too, wondering if the liability protections are quite as broad as the tech industry would like to believe. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, for example, had a long back and forth with Lisa Blatt, counsel arguing on behalf of Google, about whether YouTube would be protected by Section 230 in the hypothetical scenario in which the company promotes an ISIS video on its homepage in a box marked “featured.”
Blatt said publishing a homepage is inherent to operating a website so should be covered by Section 230, and that organization is a core function of platforms, so if topic headings can’t be covered, the statute basically becomes a “dead letter.”
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan suggested it’s not necessary to agree completely with Google’s assessment of the fallout from altering 230 to fear the potential consequences.
“I don’t have to accept all of Ms. Blatt’s ‘the sky is falling’ stuff to accept something about, ‘Boy, there’s a lot of uncertainty about going the way you would have us go,’ in part just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area,” Kagan told Schnapper, adding the job may be better suited for Congress.
“We’re a court, we really don’t know about these things,” Kagan said. “These are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
Section 230 proponents are optimistic
Several experts rooting for Google’s success in this case said they were more optimistic after the arguments than before at a press conference convened by Chamber of Progress, a center-left industry group that Google and other major tech platforms support.
Cathy Gellis is an independent attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area who filed an amicus brief on behalf of a person running a Mastodon server, as well as a Google-funded startup advocacy group and a digital think tank. She told CNBC that briefs like hers and others seemed to have a big impact on the court.
“It would appear that if nothing else, amicus counsel, not just myself, but my other colleagues, may have saved the day because it was evident that the justices took a lot of those lessons on board,” Gellis said.
“And it appeared overall that there was not a huge appetite to upend the internet, especially on a case that I believe for them looked rather weak from a plaintiff’s point of view.”
Still, Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said while he felt more optimistic on the outcome of the Gonzalez case, he remains concerned for the future of Section 230.
“I remain petrified that the opinion is going to put all of us in an unexpected circumstance,” Goldman said.
On Wednesday, the justices will hear a similar case with a different legal question.
In Twitter v. Taamneh, the justices will similarly consider whether Twitter can be held liable for aiding and abetting under the Anti-Terrorism Act. But in this case, the focus is on whether Twitter’s decision to regularly remove terrorist posts means it had knowledge of such messages on its platform and should have taken more aggressive action against them.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Schnapper how the decision in that case could impact the one in the Google matter. Schnapper said if the court ruled against Taamneh, the Gonzalez counsel should be given the chance to amend their arguments in a way that fits the standard set in the other case.
A banner for Snowflake Inc. is displayed at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the company’s initial public offering on Sept. 16, 2020.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
MongoDB’s stock just closed out its best week on record, leading a rally in enterprise technology companies that are seeing tailwinds from the artificial intelligence boom.
In addition to MongoDB’s 44% rally, Pure Storage soared 33%, its second-sharpest gain ever, while Snowflake jumped 21%. Autodesk rose 8.4%.
Since generative AI started taking off in late 2022 following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the big winners have been Nvidia, for its graphics processing units, as well as the cloud vendors like Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and companies packaging and selling GPUs, such as Dell and Super Micro Computer.
For many cloud software vendors and other enterprise tech companies, Wall Street has been waiting to see if AI will be a boon to their business, or if it might displace it.
Quarterly results this week and commentary from company executives may have eased some of those concerns, showing that the financial benefits of AI are making their way downstream.
MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that enterprise rollouts of AI services are happening, but slowly.
“You start to see deployments of agents to automate back office, maybe automate sales and marketing, but it’s still not yet kind of full force in the enterprise,” Ittycheria said. “People want to see some wins before they deploy more investment.”
Revenue at MongoDB, which sells cloud database services, rose 24% from a year earlier to $591 million, sailing past the $556 million average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Earnings also exceeded expectations, as did the company’s full-year forecast for profit and revenue.
MongoDB said in its earnings report that it’s added more than 5,000 customers year-to-date, “the highest ever in the first half of the year.”
“We think that’s a good sign of future growth because a lot of these companies are AI native companies who are coming to MongoDB to run their business,” Ittycheria said.
Pure Storage enjoyed a record pop on Thursday, when the stock jumped 32% to an all-time high.
The data storage management vendor reported quarterly results that topped estimates and lifted its guidance for the year. But what’s exciting investors the most is early returns from Pure’s recent contract with Meta. Pure will help the social media company manage its massive storage needs efficiently with the demands of AI.
Pure said it started recognizing revenue from its Meta deployments in the second quarter, and finance chief Tarek Robbiati said on the earnings call that the company is seeing “increased interest from other hyperscalers” looking to replace their traditional storage with Pure’s technology.
‘Banger of a report’
Reports from MongoDB and Pure landed the same week that Nvidia announced quarterly earnings, and said revenue soared 56% from a year earlier, marking a ninth-straight quarter of growth in excess of 50%.
Nvidia has emerged as the world’s most-valuable company by selling advanced AI processors to all of the infrastructure providers and model developers.
While growth at Nvidia has slowed from its triple-digit rate in 2023 and 2024, it’s still expanding at a much faster pace than its megacap peers, indicating that there’s no end in sight when it comes to the expansive AI buildouts.
“It was a banger of a report,” said Brad Gerstner CEO of Altimeter Capital, in an interview with CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Thursday. “This company is accelerating at scale.”
Data analytics vendor Snowflake talked up its Snowflake AI data cloud in its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.
Snowflake shares popped 20% following better-than-expected earnings and revenue. The company also boosted its guidance for the year for product revenue, and said it has more than 6,100 customers using Snowflake AI, up from 5,200 during the prior quarter.
“Our progress with AI has been remarkable,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said on the earnings call. “Today, AI is a core reason why customers are choosing Snowflake, influencing nearly 50% of new logos won in Q2.”
Autodesk, founded in 1982, has been around much longer than MongoDB, Pure Storage or Snowflake. The company is known for its AutoCAD software used in architecture and construction.
The company has underperformed the broader tech sector of late, and last year activist investor Starboard Value jumped into the stock to push for improvements in operations and financial performance, including cost cuts. In February, Autodesk slashed 9% of its workforce, and two months later the company settled with Starboard, adding two newcomers to its board.
The stock is still trailing the Nasdaq for the year, but climbed 9.1% on Friday after Autodesk reported results that exceeded Wall Street estimates and increased its full-year revenue guidance.
Last year, Autodesk introduced Project Bernini to develop new AI models and create what it calls “AI‑driven CAD engines.”
On Thursday’s earnings call, CEO Andrew Anagnost was asked what he’s most excited about across his company’s product portfolio when it comes to AI.
Anagnost touted the ability of Autodesk to help customers simplify workflow across products and promoted the Autodesk Assistant as a way to enhance productivity through simple prompts.
He also addressed the elephant in the room: The existential threat that AI presents.
“AI may eat software,” he said, “but it’s not gonna eat Autodesk.”
WATCH: Autodesk CEO on Q2 earnings
Technology
Meta changes teen AI chatbot responses as Senate begins probe into ‘romantic’ conversations
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs after attending a Federal Trade Commission trial that could force the company to unwind its acquisitions of messaging platform WhatsApp and image-sharing app Instagram, at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 15, 2025.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
Meta on Friday said it is making temporary changes to its artificial intelligence chatbot policies related to teenagers as lawmakers voice concerns about safety and inappropriate conversations.
The social media giant is now training its AI chatbots so that they do not generate responses to teenagers about subjects like self-harm, suicide, disordered eating and avoid potentially inappropriate romantic conversations, a Meta spokesperson confirmed.
The company said AI chatbots will instead point teenagers to expert resources when appropriate.
“As our community grows and technology evolves, we’re continually learning about how young people may interact with these tools and strengthening our protections accordingly,” the company said in a statement.
Additionally, teenage users of Meta apps like Facebook and Instagram will only be able to access certain AI chatbots intended for educational and skill-development purposes.
The company said it’s unclear how long these temporary modifications will last, but they will begin rolling out over the next few weeks across the company’s apps in English-speaking countries. The “interim changes” are part of the company’s longer-term measures over teen safety.
TechCrunch was first to report the change.
Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said that he was launching an investigation into Meta following a Reuters report about the company permitting its AI chatbots to engage in “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with teens and children.
The Reuters report described an internal Meta document that detailed permissible AI chatbot behaviors that staff and contract workers should take into account when developing and training the software.
In one example, the document cited by Reuters said that a chatbot would be allowed to have a romantic conversation with an eight-year-old and could tell the minor that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”
A Meta spokesperson told Reuters at the time that “The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed.”
Most recently, the nonprofit advocacy group Common Sense Media released a risk assessment of Meta AI on Thursday and said that it should not be used by anyone under the age of 18, because the “system actively participates in planning dangerous activities, while dismissing legitimate requests for support,” the nonprofit said in a statement.
“This is not a system that needs improvement. It’s a system that needs to be completely rebuilt with safety as the number-one priority, not an afterthought,” said Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer in a statement. “No teen should use Meta AI until its fundamental safety failures are addressed.”
A separate Reuters report published on Friday found “dozens” of flirty AI chatbots based on celebrities like Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The report said that when prompted, the AI chatbots would generate “photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.”
A Meta spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that “the AI-generated imagery of public figures in compromising poses violates our rules.”
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” the Meta spokesperson said. “Meta’s AI Studio rules prohibit the direct impersonation of public figures.”
WATCH: Is the A.I. trade overdone?
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