San Bernardino Shooting Victims' Families Accuse Twitter, Facebook, Google Of Supporting ISIS

Family members of the victims of the San Bernardino terrorist attack in 2015 filed a lawsuit accusing Twitter, Facebook and Google of knowingly abetting and allowing the Islamic State group and other extremist groups to spread their agenda.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Diego Wednesday, argues the tech giants are in part responsible for allowing ISIS to build its online presence, which it used to recruit members, including the husband and wife who carried out the attack on Dec. 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, California.

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That shooting, which took place at the Inland Regional Center — a nonprofit agency that serves people with developmental disabilities — injured 22 and left 14 people dead, including Sierra Clayborn, Tin Nguyen and Nicholas Thalasinos, whose family members filed the suit.

The relatives of the victims argue content spread online using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google helped to radicalize the perpetrators of the shooting, and amounts to tacit support of ISIS.

“Even if [the shooters] had never been directly in contact with ISIS, ISIS’ use of social media directly influenced their actions on the day of the San Bernardino massacre,” the lawsuit states. “Without defendants Twitter, Facebook and Google [YouTube], the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible.”

The suit holds the tech companies are liable for aiding and abetting acts of terrorism, the wrongful deaths of the San Bernardino victims and supporting a foreign terrorist group, among other claims.

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“We are committed to providing a service where people feel safe when using Facebook,” a spokesperson for Facebook told International Business Times. “There is no place on Facebook for groups that engage in terrorist activity or for content that expresses support for such activity, and we take swift action to remove this content when it’s reported to us. We sympathize with the victims and their families.”

Twitter declined to comment, and Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Similar suits have been filed against the companies in other cases of terrorism. Following the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub, Facebook, Twitter and Google faced similar accusations in a suit filed on behalf of the families of several of the victims of the attack.

The father of a victim of an ISIS-supported attack in Paris also sued the companies for their supposed role in allowing for the spread of extremist content.

Twitter was singled out in a case filed by the family of a contractor killed in a terror attack in Jordan that claimed the social network enabled the spread of violent ideologies. The wife of a victim of a terrorist attack in Brussels similarly accused Twitter of allowing ISIS to fundraise and gather support on its platform.

Twitter’s transparency report said the company suspended 376,890 accounts for violations related to promotion of terrorism from July 1 to Dec. 31 — including 74 percent of which were caught by the company’s internal identification tools. Twitter has suspended 636,248 accounts since Aug. 1, 2015.