US Supreme Court ruling can make the net less safe, says Google

Alphabet’s Google told the US Supreme Court in a filing on Thursday that undercutting social media’s legal protections could make the internet less safe and useful for its billions of users.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content—including controversial political speech—while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content.

Further, the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could “upend the internet,” resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content, Google said in the Thursday filing.