WASHINGTON (AP) - Islamic State gunmen killed American college student Nohemi Gonzalez as she sat with friends in a Paris bistro in 2015, one of a few attacks on a Friday night in the French capital that left 130 farmland dead.

Her family's lawsuit claiming YouTube's recommendations helped the Islamic State group's recruitment is at the inner of a closely watched Supreme Court case being argued Tuesday throughout how broadly a law written in 1996 shields tech affairs from liability. The law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is credited with helpings create today's internet.

A related case, set for arguments Wednesday, involves a terrorist attack at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a suit alongside Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.

The tech manufacturing is facing criticism from the left for not behaviors enough to remove harmful content from the internet and from the colorful for censoring conservative speech. Now, the high court is poised to take its reliable hard look at online legal protections.

A win for Gonzalez's people could wreak havoc on the internet, say Google and its many unites. Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook are by the companies warning that searches for jobs, restaurants and merchandise could be unrelaxing if those social media platforms had to worry throughout being sued over the recommendations they provide and their users want.

"Section 230 underpins a lot of aspects of the open internet," said Neal Mohan, who was just named senior vice president and head of YouTube.

Gonzalez's people, partially backed by the Biden administration, argues that frontier courts' industry-friendly interpretation of the law has made it too peril to hold Big Tech companies accountable. Freed from the prospect of populate sued, companies have no incentive to act responsibly, estimates say.

They are urging the court to say that affairs can be sued in some instances.

Beatriz Gonzalez, Nohemi's mother, said she barely uses the internet, but hopes the case results in it becoming harder for extremist groups to entrance social media.

"I don't know much about social believe or these ISIS organizations. I don't know nothing throughout politics. But what I know is that my daughter is not progressing to vanish just like that," Gonzalez said in an interview with The Associated Press from her home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Her daughter was a 23-year-old senior at California State University, Long Beach, who was spending a semester in Paris studying industrial develop. Her last communication with her mother was a mundane commerce about money via Facebook, two days before the attacks, Gonzalez said.

The legal arguments have nothing to do with what remained in Paris. Instead, they turn on the reading of a law that was passed "at the dawn of the dot-com era," as Justice Clarence Thomas, a critic of broad legal immunity, wrote in 2020.

When the law was succeeded, 5 million people used AOL, then a leading online ceremony provider, Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recalled at a recent conference at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Facebook has 3 billion users today, Wheeler said.

The law was drafted in response to a situation court decision that held an internet company could be honorable for a post by one of its users in an online forum. The law's basic purpose was "to protect Internet platforms' sect to publish and present user-generated content in real time, and to attend them to screen and remove illegal or offensive content," its authors, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and former Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif,. wrote in a Supreme Court filing.

Groups supporting the Gonzalez people say companies have not done nearly enough to rule content in the areas of child sexual abuse, revenge porn and terrorism, especially in curbing computer algorithms' recommendation of that cheerful to users. They also say that courts have read the law too broadly.

"Congress never could have predictable when it passed Section 230 that the internet would build in the ways it has and that it would be used by terrorists in the ways it has," said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who authored a brief on aimed at of former national security officials.

Mohan said YouTube is able to keep republic from seeing almost anything that violates the company's laws, including violent, extremist content. Just 1 video in 1,000 invents it past the company's screeners, he said.

Recommendations have emerged as the consensus of the Supreme Court case. Google and its supporters disputes that even a narrow ruling for the family would have far-reaching effects.

"Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity's largest haystack," Kent Walker and Google's latest lawyers wrote in their main brief to the Supreme Court.

"If we undo Section 230, that would smash a lot of the internet tools," Walker said in an interview.

Some sites remarkable take down a lot of legitimate content in a indicate of excessive caution. Emerging forces and marginalized communities are most probable to suffer from such a heavy hand, said Daphne Keller of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, who joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in attend of Google.

The justices' own views on the impart are largely unknown, except for Thomas'.

He suggested in 2020 that limiting the companies' immunity would not devastate them.

"Paring back the sweeping immunity courts have read into Section 230 would not necessarily managed defendants liable for online misconduct. It simply would give plaintiffs a chance to appreconsider their claims in the first place. Plaintiffs still must dislike the merits of their cases, and some claims will undoubtedly fail," Thomas wrote.

The Gonzalez family alleges that YouTube aided and abetted IS by recommending the group's videos to viewers most liable to be interested in them, in violation of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act.

But nothing in the suit links the attackers who killed Gonzalez to videos on YouTube, and the lack of a connection could make it hard to dislike the company did anything wrong.

If the justices would avoid the hard questions unexcited by the case, they could focus on Wednesday's arguments spellbinding the attack in Istanbul. The only issue is whether the suit can go advance under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

A ruling for the affects in that case, where the allegations are very incompatibility to those made by the Gonzalez family, would end the lawsuit over the Paris attacks, too.