Every day, people around the world post about 720,000 hours of new content on YouTube—500 hours of video every minute. That enormous volume of material poses challenges for the platform, which aspires to enforce rules against certain kinds of content, and for its users, who cannot hope to navigate the site without help from YouTube's algorithms, which facilitate searches and recommend videos based on personal viewing patterns.
Those challenges underlie a case that the Supreme Court will hear next month, when it will consider whether Google, which owns YouTube, can be sued for helping the terrorist group ISIS promote its message and attract followers. The case illustrates the hazards of increased civil liability for social media companies, which critics on the right and the left wrongly see as the key to better moderation practices.
