Father of Paris massacre victim sues Facebook, Twitter

It's like punishing the weapon for a murder! In a long list of bizarre suits filed in the US, one was the father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre last November, who has sued Facebook and Twitter, claiming that the companies provided "material support" to extremists in violation of the law.

The suit claims the companies "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State group, referred to in the complaint as "ISIS", to recruit members, raise money and spread "extremist propaganda" via their social-media services. Reynaldo Gonzalez's daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks. Gonzalez filed the suit on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

A similar suit was filed against Twitter, in January, by the widow of a contractor who got killed in an attack in Jordan. It includes numerous identical passages and screenshots.

Dismissing the blame as baseless, Facebook and Twitter said on Wednesday that Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all the three companies, including Google, cited their policies against the extremist material.

Quite obviously, the US law exempts internet companies from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

However, Gonzalez's legal team said in an email that "This complaint is not about what ISIS's messages say. It is about Google, Twitter, and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations. The Gonzales complaint also alleges that Google's YouTube shared revenue with IS from ads that ran with its videos.