BUFFALO, N.Y. — In a pair of opinions this year, the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to hold social media companies Twitter and Google responsible for promoting or failing to filter terrorist activities on the platforms.

Syracuse Crandall Melvin law professor Shubha Ghosh said the cases bear similarities to two now pending in New York State Supreme Court in which families of the victims of the Buffalo Tops mass murder want a number of platforms held liable.

"The court did not say that these cases are never possible, it just simply said in the Twitter and Google instances involving the bombings in Turkey and Isis, the parties did not raise a claim," Ghosh said.

Ghosh, who is the SU Technology Commercialization Law program and Intellectual Property Law program director, said arguments social media algorithms drove the shooter to kill 10 Black people and wound others may be difficult to make.

"There's some creative lawyering that can be done here but in the Google case there was not exactly the addiction loop language but the idea that Google was helping to monetize ISIS activities and profiting from it and promulgating the videos and their propaganda to susceptible people and the court was not amenable to those types of theories," he said.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is legislation Congress passed in the early days of the internet to address concerns about unlimited liability for websites in defamation suits. Ghosh said in the past several decades, Congress has only added one exception allowing victims to hold platforms responsible in some cases for sexual trafficking.

In the opinions this year, the court could have created a precedent to expand the immunity to violence but did not.

"If you go back to the Supreme Court opinions in Twitter and Google from earlier this year, why the court ducked on the 230 issue is I think they wanted Congress to address this before the court does," he said.

The professor said ultimately the litigation will come down to the facts of the case which could be very different than the ones connected to the ISIS bombing in Turkey.

"Here it seems like one important difference would be that the platforms were used to broadcast the events live and that raises a different set of policies," Ghosh said.