Opinion of the Court
§2333(d)(2), plaintiffs sued three major social-media companies—Facebook, Inc., Google, Inc., and Twitter, Inc.—claiming that they aided and abetted ISIS and thus were liable for the Reina nightclub attack.[1]
As is common knowledge, these three companies control three of the largest and most ubiquitous platforms on the internet: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. At the time of the Reina attack, Facebook had over 2 billion active users each month, YouTube had over 1 billion, and Twitter had around 330 million. See Facebook, Inc., Form 10–K for Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2017, p. 34; Twitter, Inc., Form 10–K for Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2017, p. 47; YouTube, YouTube Hits a Billion Monthly Users (Mar. 21, 2013), https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/onebillionstrong. At least for Facebook and YouTube, those numbers are even higher today. See Meta Platforms, Inc., Form 10–K for Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2022, p. 56 (nearly 3 billion); L. Ceci, Statista, YouTube–Statistics & Facts (Mar. 22, 2023), https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/#topicOverview (2.56 billion).
Everyone before us today agrees on the basic aspects of these platforms’ business models. People from around the world can sign up for the platforms and start posting content on them, free of charge and without much (if any) advance screening by defendants. Once on the platforms, users can upload messages, videos, and other types of content, which others on the platform can then view, respond to, and share. As noted above, billions of people have done just that. As a result, the amount of content on defendants’ platforms is staggering. It appears that for every minute of the day, approximately 500 hours of video are uploaded to
- ↑ Although Twitter, Inc., is the named petitioner and defendant, Twitter, Inc., has since been merged into X Corp., a subsidiary of X Holdings Corp. Similarly, although Facebook, Inc., and Google, Inc., are the named defendants, Facebook, Inc., is now known as Meta Platforms, Inc., and Google, Inc., is now Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc.
