The United States Supreme Court is poised to hear two cases concerning the responsibilities of social networks.

In the first, Gonzalez v. Google, the Court will have to rule on Google’s responsibility for allowing videos with radical content to circulate on its YouTube application. The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a US citizen shot dead in Paris during the 2015 attacks, is convinced that the terrorists could not have acted without recruiting accomplices via YouTube.

In the second case of Taamneh v. Twitter, the family of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian murdered by Daesh in an Istanbul nightclub in 2017, claims that the terrorists were emboldened by the ease with which they were able to post their propaganda on Twitter.

The cases come at a time when Texas and Florida have passed laws allowing social media to be sued if they stifle different viewspoints.

In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees complete freedom of expression, including calls for murder.

The main question the Supreme Court will have to consider concerns the rules on algorithms. Today, social networks are funded by advertisements. Consequently, they develop algorithms allowing them to captivate Internet users as long as possible, exposing them to a maximum amount of advertising. A choice that so far has even led them to promote content that they do not necessarily agree with.