The robust immunity provision in the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, 47 U.S.C. §230 et seq., 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.” 47 U.S.C. §230(c)(1). Section 230 was in part a reaction to the decision of the New York Supreme Court, Nassau County, in which an Internet service provider became a “publisher” of offensive content on its message boards because it deleted some posts but not others. See Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy Servs. Co., 1995 WL 323710 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. May 24, 1995) (unpublished). This holding put the ISP in the unenviable and logistically untenable position of choosing between voluntarily removing some offensive third-party content, which would expose the site to liability for the content it did not remove, or filtering nothing, which would prompt liability for all third-party content.

Congress reacted with the passage of §230(c)(1) and the doctrine has evolved considerably in the two decades since, largely in the direction of broadening the scope of the immunity. But see Fair Hous. Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roomates.Com, 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008) (observing that the CDA does not “create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet”).

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