A Massive Roundup of Section 230 Decisions
This post also owes its origins to my 2-week trip to China in June. Section 230 decisions started backing up while I was on the trip and never stopped accruing. In total, this post covers about 30 decisions in 7k+ words. Whew! Some of these decisions are real stinkers, too.
Doe v. City of Warwick, 2025 WL 2197311 (D.R.I. Aug. 1, 2025)
This case involves a third-party service that collects anonymous citizen tips for law enforcement. The service is called Tip411 and is offered by Citizen Observer. The city of Warwick adopted Tip411. Doe claims that Roe anonymously submitted harassing tips to Tip411. All of the tips proved false, but the tips caused law enforcement to confront Doe in an aggressive manner.
Doe sued Citizen Observer for negligently designing its service. Citizen Observer invoked Section 230. The court says that Doe properly stated a products liability claim:
His claims are based on the Tip411 product; that is, he is asserting product liability, negligence, and breach of warranty claims based on Citizen Observer’s own conduct in developing, marketing, and selling an allegedly defective law enforcement tool. His claims are also focused on the absence of adequate warnings to Tip411 users and Citizen Observer’s failure to provide municipal trainings. Reading the allegations in Mr. Doe’s complaint and taking the facts stated as true, the Court finds that Mr. Doe claims against Citizen Observer are product liability claims based on its conduct in defectively designing and failing to warn and/or train foreseeable users and breach of warranty of the Tip411 product.
Hmm…this seems problematic. For example, what “warnings” would have changed Roe’s behavior? And Citizen Observer is supposed to teach law enforcement how to do its policing work?
It goes downhill from there:
Illogically, Citizen Observer also asserts that it acts as a passive message board and/or server host. Mr. Doe agrees with the latter, asserting that Citizen Observer does not take part in any of the communication that is directed through their platform in anyway, as they do not monitor, filter, or address the tips that travel through the application. Because it has been established that a publisher takes part in “reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or to withdraw from publication third-party content[,]” Mr. Doe asserts that it is impossible for Citizen Observer to be immune as a publisher and/or speaker of Mr. Roe’s posts when it acts as a passive message board and does not review, edit, or monitor what posts are published on its platform. The Court finds that Mr. Doe’s claims do not treat Citizen Observer as a publisher and therefore it is not immune from his state-law claims.
No. Just no. Section 230 protects the decision not to edit (a leave-up decision) just as much as the decision to edit (remove). And “conduits” get just as much Section 230 protection as web hosts. For example, IAPs aren’t liable for third-party content flowing through their network (230’s definition of ICS expressly includes IAPs). So this is clearly wrong. Let’s hope the court gets on track in the next round.
Chabot v. Frazier, 2025 WL 2164002 (Tex. Ct. App. July 30, 2025)
Chabot contends Frazier’s claims for defamation relating to Chabot’s republication of the December 2023 DMN and WFAA.com articles are barred by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the CDA)….Simply put, the CDA generally bars defamation and libel claims against an entity that merely passively permits the publishing (or, here, the republishing) of another’s content. GoDaddy.com, LLC v. Toups, 429 S.W.3d 752, 755 (Tex. App.—Beaumont 2014, pet. denied). Chabot maintains that the website is a provider of an interactive computer service as defined by the CDA, that the content at issue was provided by another information content provider, and Frazier’s allegations improperly seek to treat Chabot as a publisher of the content posted on the website
Frazier argues that Chabot is not entitled to immunity for his publication of the 2023 WFAA.com article because Chabot did not act neutrally when he republished the article under the headline “Collin County Rep. Fred Frazier Dishonorably Discharged from DPD” after he had been informed of the article’s inaccuracies and after WFAA had published an updated and corrected article. Frazier asserts that instead Chabot acted as an information content provider by republishing the article.
Under the limited record here and viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Frazier, we conclude Chabot did not establish as a matter of law immunity under the CDA
Ugh, this line: “the CDA generally bars defamation and libel claims against an entity that merely passively permits the publishing (or, here, the republishing) of another’s content.” The phrase “passively permits the publishing” is gibberish. Publishing is never passive!
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