Page:Twitter v. Taamneh.pdf/35

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Cite as: 598 U. S. ____ (2023)
29

Opinion of the Court

with their millions or billions of other users—and their undisputed lack of intent to support ISIS. See id., at 910.

Taken as a whole, the Ninth Circuit’s analytic approach thus elided the fundamental question of aiding-and-abetting liability: Did defendants consciously, voluntarily, and culpably participate in or support the relevant wrongdoing? As we have explained above, the answer in this case is no. Plaintiffs allege only that defendants supplied generally available virtual platforms that ISIS made use of, and that defendants failed to stop ISIS despite knowing it was using those platforms. Given the lack of nexus between that assistance and the Reina attack, the lack of any defendant intending to assist ISIS, and the lack of any sort of affirmative and culpable misconduct that would aid ISIS, plaintiffs’ claims fall far short of plausibly alleging that defendants aided and abetted the Reina attack.

C

That leaves the set of allegations specific to Google. As explained above, plaintiffs allege that Google reviewed and approved ISIS videos on YouTube as part of its revenue-sharing system and thereby shared advertising revenue with ISIS. The Ninth Circuit briefly mentioned those allegations when analyzing plaintiffs’ complaint here. However, in addressing another, materially identical complaint, the Ninth Circuit held that the same allegations “failed to state a claim for aiding-and-abetting liability” because they were “devoid of any allegations about how much assistance Google provided” and therefore did not plausibly allege “that Google’s assistance was substantial.” Id., at 907.

We think that the Ninth Circuit was correct in that holding. The complaint here alleges nothing about the amount of money that Google supposedly shared with ISIS, the number of accounts approved for revenue sharing, or the content of the videos that were approved. It thus could be the case that Google approved only one ISIS-related video