Lawyers say Twitter will likely weather legal challenges from an Israel-based group that tries to combat terrorism through litigation, which is claiming the San Francisco-based company is violating U.S. law by allowing groups like Hezbollah and al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab to use its microblogging service.
In a letter sent to Twitter last week, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, threatened legal action and said Twitter and its officers could also face criminal charges if the accounts in question are not taken down.
Matt Graves, a spokesperson for Twitter, declined comment.
Darshan-Leitner built her argument on Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, a 2010 Supreme Court Case that upheld a provision of the Patriot Act that prohibits material support to groups designated as terrorist outfits by the U.S. State Department.
“Your provision of social media and associated services to Hezbollah and other foreign terrorist organizations would constitute the type of seemingly innocuous material support that would render your company and you personally criminally and civilly liable,” Darshan-Leitner wrote.
The case seems weak at best. The Supreme Court has not directly addressed whether speech supportive of a designated terrorist group is unlawful. But Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN “the government can’t force private companies to censor lawful speech just because the government doesn’t like the speech or the people making the speech.”
And Joe Sellers, a First Amendment lawyer at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, told the Washington Post that Twitter can be compared to a newspaper that provides advertising space: the company is, Sellers said, “providing a public forum” that is “content-neutral.”
“I don’t see how Twitter’s provision of a forum would constitute providing aid and support of a terrorist group,” Seller says.
As reported last month, the U.S. government has also put pressure on Twitter to shut down the account used by the Shabab militant group of Somalia. The group has been using its Twitter account to taunt the Kenyan military, which was dispatched to Somalia in October to combat the Shabab.
