Section 230 Protects Twitter In Defamation Suit, Fed Court Rules

LOS ANGELES—Even as attempts to weaken the online free speech protections guaranteed by the law known as Section 230 come from both sides of the aisle in Congress, courts have continued to uphold the law in a series of lawsuits. The latest comes from the United States Eastern District of New York, which ruled last week that the 24-year-old law shields Twitter from a defamation lawsuit. Known as the “First Amendment of the Internet,” Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, grants online platforms legal immunity for content posted by users. The law is crucial for the online adult industry in particular, because sexual content is often the first to be targeted when free speech protections are rolled back. In the case, Brikman v. Twitter, Mayer Chaim Brikman, the rabbi of a Brooklyn, N.Y., synagogue claimed that a group of “disgruntled” congregation members created a Twitter account that “impersonated” the synagogue. The spoof account posted numerous tweets that, the rabbi claimed, defamed him and the synagogue.  But the social media company argued that under the provisions of Section 230, it was protected from legal liability because it was not a “publisher,” but instead an “interactive computer service,” a category which is specifically shielded by the law. Federal Judge Rachel P. Kovner agreed. Because the rabbi’s lawsuit demanded that Twitter remove the allegedly defamatory posts, the suit made the mistake of treating Twitter as, in fact, a “publisher.” The decision whether or not to remove content is the role of a publisher, not an interactive computer service, the judge ruled. Kovner was appointed to the bench in October of last year by Donald Trump. But Trump himself has made scaling back or even repealing Section 230 an issue. Earlier this year, he signed an executive order calling on the Federal Communications Commission to review and potentially rewrite the law. Kovner in her 10-page decision wrote that Brikman’s lawsuit offered no “indication that a valid claim may be stated.” As a result, she dismissed the rabbi’s lawsuit “with prejudice,” meaning that he may not rewrite his legal complain and resubmit it. The decision follows a pair of rulings in August involving Section 230, as AVN reported. In one, a court held that the law protected the classified ad site Craigslist from a lawsuit by a woman who alleged that she had been sex-trafficked through an advertisement on the site. But in the second case, U.S. Eastern District Judge LaShan Darcy Hall — a 2015 Barack Obama appointee — held that Section 230 did not protect the creator of an online spreadsheet titled “Shitty Media Men.” The spreadsheet was a list of men in the media accused of sexual misconduct.  Because the creator of the list also wrote some of the entries making accusations against men in the media, she qualified as a “publisher” and was not entitled to Section 230 legal immunity, Hall ruled. Photo By Howard Lake / Wikimedia Commons