PFLAG v. Camdenton R–III School Dist., 2012 WL 510877 (W.D.Mo. Feb. 16, 2012)
Several website publishers that provide supportive resources directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth filed a First Amendment lawsuit against a school district over the district’s use of internet filtering software. Plaintiffs asked the court for an injunction against the district’s alleged practice of preventing students’ access to websites that expressed a positive viewpoint toward LGBT individuals.
The court granted a preliminary injunction. It found that by using URL Blacklist software, the district (despite its assertions to the contrary) engaged in intentional viewpoint discrimination, in violation of the website publishers’ First Amendment rights. The URL Blacklist software — which relied in large part on dmoz.org — classified positive materials about LGBT issues within the software’s “sexuality” filter, and it put LGBT-negative materials under “religion,” which were not blocked.
It found that the plaintiffs had a fair chance of success on the merits of their First Amendment claims. The school district had claimed it was simply trying to comply with a federal law that required the blocking of content harmful to minors. But the court found that the chosen method of filtering was not narrowly tailored to meet that interest.
One may wonder whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act could have protected the school district in this lawsuit. After all, 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(2)(A) provides that:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. . . . (Emphasis added.)
Section 230 would probably not have been much help, because the plaintiffs were seeking injunctive relief, not money damages. An old case called Mainstream Loudoun v. Bd. of Trustees of Loudoun, 24 F. Supp. 2d 552 (E.D. Va. 1998) tells us that:
[Section] 230 provides immunity from actions for damages; it does not, however, immunize [a] defendant from an action for declaratory and injunctive relief. . . . If Congress had intended the statute to insulate Internet providers from both liability and declaratory and injunctive relief, it would have said so.
One could understand the undesirability of applying Section 230 to protect filtering of this sort even without the Mainstream Loudoun holding. If Section 230 completely immunized government-operated interactive computer service providers, allowing them to engage freely in viewpoint-based filtering, free speech would suffer in obvious ways. And it would be unfortunate to subject Section 230 to this kind of analysis, whereby it would face the severe risk of being unconstitutional as applied.