Social Media Took the Heat for Terror Attacks. A Tel Aviv Lawyer Took the Cases.

Originally published January 2017. Updated June 2026.

In Paris, Brussels, across Israel, and in the United States, the families of terror victims spent a decade looking for a defendant. They found one. Facebook. Twitter. TikTok. The carriage layer.

In 2017 the framing was that public pressure was building to push the platforms to "do something." A decade later the answer has clarified. It did not come from public pressure. It came from civil court.

The Plaintiff

The pioneer of the platform-litigation track is Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2003 on an explicit directive from the late Mossad chief Meir Dagan — "If you want to defeat terrorism, go after the money" — Shurat HaDin built the civil-litigation doctrine that has driven the major platform suits.

The Arc

• Sokolow v. PLO — the landmark US federal precedent: terror organizations can be sued under the Anti-Terrorism Act for attacks on Americans abroad.
• The Facebook billion-dollar suit on behalf of Israeli terror victims — dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, but tightened Facebook's enforcement of terror-content policy.
• The Twitter suit on behalf of US victims of ISIS — surfaced platform-liability questions still being litigated.
• Airbnb — Shurat HaDin sued after Airbnb attempted to delist Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. Airbnb reversed the policy.
• TikTok — ongoing platform litigation after October 7.

The Metaphor That Did the Work

The AP-era framing from 2017 — that platforms carrying terror communications should bear liability comparable to banks running wire transfers — was easy to understand, easy to share, easy to remember. It moved policy because it moved minds. Shurat HaDin built the case law on top of the metaphor.

An attorney for the victims, in 2017: "If you or I tried to send money to Hamas, you wouldn't get around the block. Banks are required to check before they do any wire transfers. Why is it any different to provide a communications platform to Hamas, to ISIS?"

That sentence became a doctrine.

Where It Sits in 2026

Total recovered for terror victims by Shurat HaDin: more than $200 million across cases in Israel, the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Section 230 still shields most US platforms from most claims. The platforms have tightened enforcement substantially since 2017 — not entirely because of the lawsuits, but in part because of them. Twitter (X), Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok all maintain anti-terror policy. Enforcement is uneven. The lawsuits remain part of the pressure system.

The October 7 era added new cases — UNRWA, the Red Cross, and ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan personally. The doctrine has not slowed. It has accelerated.

The Communications Lesson

Message control captures public sentiment in every contested issue. The bank-metaphor frame won the framing war in 2017. The lawyers won the casework in the decade after. The frame and the casework reinforce each other. Either alone would have lost.

The EPR Cluster — PR, Terror, Regimes, and the AI Citation

Six EPR case files. One spine. PR ethics. Terror and regime clients. The counter-doctrine in courtrooms. The permanent line item inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

• Public Relations for Terrorists and the PR Firms That Whitewash Regimes — the Corporate Europe Observatory file.
• How Terrorist Groups Use Digital PR — the methods being litigated against.
• The Muslim Brotherhood, Ennahda, and Western PR — the Burson-Marsteller case file.
• When PR Firms Represent the Indefensible: The Zakir Naik Case — Perfect Relations, PRGN, and the AI permanence variable.
• Ketchum, Qorvis/MSL Group, and the $168M Human Rights Trade — the CPI file, the firms, the price tag.

Anchor: Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Shurat HaDin — the lawfare doctrine the press never replaced.