Section 230 protected a website from liability over content its users posted, in a recent case from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Plaintiff sued defendant website operator for trade libel. The website had a forum board, and two forum board users posted that plaintiff was under federal investigation.
Likely recognizing Section 230 immunity would be an obstacle, plaintiff pled certain key facts about the posts’ authors. It claimed the two authors were longtime users. And it noted defendant occasionally paid its users to generate content. So plaintiff claimed the authors were “volunteers, employees, servants, contractors or agents of [defendant].” According to plaintiff’s logic, this would make the defendant website operator the “information content provider” of the offending posts.
The court did not buy that argument. Neither did the appellate court. The Communications Decency Act (at 47 U.S.C. §230) immunizes providers of interactive computer services against liability arising from content created by third parties. The Act provides that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
The court held that these facts that plaintiff put forward did not plausibly show that defendant website operator was an information content provider. Since the facts only showed that independent parties created the offending posts, Section 230 immunity applied.
East Coast Test Prep LLC v. Allnurses.com, Inc., — F.3d —, 2020 WL 4809911 (8th Cir. August 19, 2020)
See also:
- Section 230 protected Twitter from liability for deleting Senate candidate’s accounts
- Facebook scores Section 230 win over claims brought by Russian page accused of meddling in 2016 U.S. presidential election
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About the author
Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago practicing copyright, trademark, technology and in other areas of the law. His clients include individuals and companies in many industries, as well as the technology companies that serve them. Twitter: @internetcases