Amy Coney Barrett on Social Media Liability and Aiding/Abetting Infringement

Secondary Liability in Online Platforms

• 💡 Justice Barrett discussed secondary liability for illegal activities on social media, drawing parallels to common law principles.
• 📌 The discussion referenced the Supreme Court's adoption of secondary liability principles from copyright law, specifically citing Groster and Sony.
• 🎯 A key point was that platforms could be liable for aiding and abetting only if a causal connection is shown between highlighted content and an attack.

The Twitter Standard and Platform Knowledge

• 🧠 The Twitter case emphasized that liability for aiding and abetting requires the defendant to have participated in the wrongdoing with the desire for it to succeed.
• ⚠️ At worst, platforms like Twitter treated all users the same, which was not sufficient for liability.
• ⚖️ Barrett clarified that even if a platform like Twitter knew a user was facilitating child trafficking, it would not be secondarily liable.

Direct vs. Secondary Liability

• 🚀 The concept of direct liability for platforms was explored, where a platform might be considered to be speaking the words itself.
• 📜 The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (Section 230) was mentioned, stating that platforms hosting third-party content are generally not treated as the publisher or speaker of that content.
• 🛠️ For direct copyright infringement, which is a strict liability offense, a platform could be liable if it's considered the one performing the infringing content.
• 🚫 However, in the case of Cox, which provides infrastructure, there was no plausible theory of direct liability.