In YOLO Ruling, Ninth Circuit Cracks Open Pandora’s Box For Section 230
from the you-only-destroy-the-internet-once dept
The Ninth Circuit appeals court seems to have figured out the best way to “reform” Section 230: by pretending it doesn’t apply to some stuff that the judges there just randomly decide it doesn’t apply to anymore. At least that’s my reading of the recent ruling against YOLO Technologies.
Now, let’s start by making something clear: YOLO Technologies appears to be a horrible company, making a horrible service, run by horrible people. We’ll get more into the details of that below. I completely understand the instinctual desire that YOLO should lose. That said, there are elements of this ruling that could lead to dangerous results for other services that aren’t horrible. And that’s what always worries me.
First, a quick history lesson: over fifteen years ago, we wrote about the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Barnes v. Yahoo. At the time, and in the years since Barnes, that ruling seemed potentially problematic. The case revolved around another horrible situation, where an ex-boyfriend posted fake profiles. Barnes contacted Yahoo and reached a Director of Communications who promised to “take care of” the fake profiles.
However, the profiles remained up. Barnes sued, and Yahoo used 230 to try to get out of it. Much of the Barnes decision is very good. It’s an early decision that makes it clear Section 230 protects websites for their publishing activity of third-party content. It clearly debunks the completely backwards notion that you are “either a platform or a publisher” and only “platforms” get 230 protections. In Barnes, the court is quite clear that what Yahoo is doing is publishing activity, but since it is an interactive computer service and the underlying content is from a third party, it cannot be held liable as the publisher for that publishing activity under Section 230.
And yet, the court still sided with Barnes, noting that the direct promise from the employee at Yahoo to take care of the content went outside of traditional publishing activity and created a promise, and therefore a duty to live up to that promise.
In the fifteen years since that ruling, there have been various attempts to use Barnes to get around Section 230, but most have failed, as they didn’t have that clear promise like Barnes had. However, in the last couple of months, it seems the Ninth Circuit has decided that the “promise” part of Barnes can be used more broadly, and that could create a mess.
In YOLO, the company makes an add-on to Snapchat that lets users post questions and polls on the app. Other users could respond anonymously (they also had the option to reveal who they were). The app was very popular, but it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that some users used to harass and abuse others.
However YOLO claimed publicly, and in how it represented the service to users who signed up, that one way it would deal with harassment and abuse would be to reveal those users. As the Ninth Circuit explains:
As a hedge against these potential problems, YOLO added two “statements” to its application: a notification to new users promising that they would be “banned for any inappropriate usage,” and another promising to unmask the identity of any user who “sen[t] harassing messages” to others.
But it appears that YOLO never actually intended to live up to this, or it just became overwhelmed, because it appears not to have done it.
Now, this is always a bit tricky, because what some users consider abuse and harassment, a service (or other users!) might not consider to be abuse and harassment. But, in this case, it seems pretty clear that whatever trust & safety practices YOLO had were not living up to the notification it gave to users:
All four were inundated with harassing, obscene, and bullying messages including “physical threats, obscene sexual messages and propositions, and other humiliating comments.” Users messaged A.C. suggesting that she kill herself, just as her brother had done. A.O. was sent a sexual message, and her friend was told she was a “whore” and “boy-obsessed.” A.K. received death threats, was falsely accused of drug use, mocked for donating her hair to a cancer charity, and exhorted to “go kill [her]self,” which she seriously considered. She suffered for years thereafter. Carson Bride was subjected to constant humiliating messages, many sexually explicit and highly disturbing.
These users, and their families, sought to unmask the abusers. Considering that YOLO told users that’s how abuse and harassment would be dealt with, it wasn’t crazy for them to think that might work. But it did not. At all.
A.K. attempted to utilize YOLO’s promised unmasking feature but received no response. Carson searched the internet diligently for ways to unmask the individuals sending him harassing messages, with no success. Carson’s parents continued his efforts after his death, first using YOLO’s “Contact Us” form on its Customer Support page approximately two weeks after his death. There was no answer. Approximately three months later, his mother Kristin Bride sent another message, this time to YOLO’s law enforcement email, detailing what happened to Carson and the messages he received in the days before his death. The email message bounced back as undeliverable because the email address was invalid. She sent the same to the customer service email and received an automated response promising an answer that never came. Approximately three months later, Kristin reached out to a professional friend who contacted YOLO’s CEO on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, with no success. She also reached out again to YOLO’s law enforcement email, with the same result as before.
So, uh, yeah. Not great! Pretty terrible. And so there’s every reason to want YOLO to be in trouble here. The court determines that YOLO’s statements about unmasking harassers meant that it had made a promise, a la Barnes, and therefore had effectively violated an obligation which was separate from its publishing activities that were protected by Section 230.
Turning first to Plaintiffs’ misrepresentation claims, we find that Barnes controls. YOLO’s representation to its users that it would unmask and ban abusive users is sufficiently analogous to Yahoo’s promise to remove an offensive profile. Plaintiffs seek to hold YOLO accountable for a promise or representation, and not for failure to take certain moderation actions. Specifically, Plaintiffs allege that YOLO represented to anyone who downloaded its app that it would not tolerate “objectionable content or abusive users” and would reveal the identities of anyone violating these terms. They further allege that all Plaintiffs relied on this statement when they elected to use YOLO’s app, but that YOLO never took any action, even when directly requested to by A.K. In fact, considering YOLO’s staff size compared to its user body, it is doubtful that YOLO ever intended to act on its own representation.
And, again, given all the details, this feels understandable. But I still worry about where the boundaries are here. We’ve seen plenty of other cases. For example, six years ago, when the white supremacist Jared Taylor sued Twitter for banning him, he argued that it could not ban users because Twitter had said that it “believe[s] in free expression and believe[s] every voice has the power to impact the world.”
So it seems like there needs to be some clear line. In Barnes, there was a direct communication between the person and the company where an executive at the company directly made a promise to Barnes. That’s not the case in the YOLO ruling.
And when we combine the YOLO ruling with the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the Calise case back in June, things get a little more worrisome. I didn’t get a chance to cover that ruling when it came out, but Eric Goldman did a deep dive on it and why it’s scary. That case also uses Barnes’ idea of a “promise” by the company to mean a “duty” to act that is outside of Section 230.
In that case, it was regarding scammy ads from Chinese advertisers. The court held that Meta had a “duty” based on public comments to somehow police advertisements, that was outside of its Section 230 protections. That ruling also contained a separate concurrence (oddly written by the same Judge who wrote the opinion, but which apparently he couldn’t get others to agree to) that just out and out trashed Section 230 and basically made it clear he hated it.
And thus, as Eric Goldman eloquently puts it, you have the Ninth Circuit “swiss-cheesing” Section 230 by punching all kinds of holes in it, enabling more questionable lawsuits to be brought, arguing that this or that statement by a company or a company employee represented some form of a promise under Barnes, and therefore a “duty” outside of Section 230.
In summary, Barnes is on all fours with Plaintiffs’ misrepresentation claims here. YOLO repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to. Plaintiffs seek to enforce that promise—made multiple times to them and upon which they relied—to unmask their tormentors. While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for YOLO to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty being invoked by the Plaintiffs, according to Calise, is the promise itself. See Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1106–09. Therefore, the misrepresentation claims survive.
And maybe that feels right in this case, where YOLO’s behavior is so egregious. But, it’s unclear where this theory ends, and that leaves it wide open for abuse. For example, how would this case have turned out if the messages sent to the kids weren’t actually “abusive” or “harassing”? I’m not saying that happened here, as it seems pretty clear that they were. But imagine a hypothetical where many people did not feel that the behavior was actually abusive, but the user argued that it was. Perhaps they even said this to be abusive back.
Under this ruling, would YOLO still need to reveal who the anonymous user was to avoid liability?
That seems… problematic?
However, the real lesson here is that anyone who runs a website now needs to be way more careful about what they say regarding how they moderate or do anything. Because anything they say could be used in court as an argument for why Section 230 doesn’t apply. Indeed, I could see how this could even conflict with other laws requiring websites to be more transparent about their moderation practices, but where doing so could remove 230 protections.
And I really worry about how this plays out in situations where a platform changes trust & safety policies mid-stream. I have no idea how that works out. What if when you signed up, the platform had a policy that said it would remove certain kinds of content, but later on decided to change that policy as it was ineffective. Would someone who signed up under the old policy regime now claim that the new policy regime violates the original promise that got them to sign up?
On top of that, I fear that this will lead companies to be way less transparent about their moderation policies and practices. Because now, being transparent about moderation policies means that anyone who thinks you didn’t enforce them properly might be able to sue and get around Section 230 by arguing you didn’t fulfill the duty you promised.
All that said, there is some other good language in this decision. The plaintiffs also tried a “product liability” claim, which has become a hipster legal strategy for many plaintiffs’ lawyers to try to get around Section 230. It has worked in some cases, but it fails here.
At root, all Plaintiffs’ product liability theories attempt to hold YOLO responsible for users’ speech or YOLO’s decision to publish it. For example, the negligent design claim faults YOLO for creating an app with an “unreasonable risk of harm.” What is that harm but the harassing and bullying posts of others? Similarly, the failure to warn claim faults YOLO for not mitigating, in some way, the harmful effects of the harassing and bullying content. This is essentially faulting YOLO for not moderating content in some way, whether through deletion, change, or suppression.
They also make clear, contrary to the claims we keep hearing, that an app having anonymous messaging as a feature isn’t an obvious liability. We’ve seen people claim this in many cases, but the court clearly rejects that idea:
Here, Plaintiffs allege that anonymity itself creates an unreasonable risk of harm. But we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk to sustain a theory of product liability. First, unlike in Lemmon, where the dangerous activity the alleged defective design incentivized was the dangerous behavior of speeding, here, the activity encouraged is the sharing of messages between users. See id. Second, anonymity is not only a cornerstone of much internet speech, but it is also easily achieved. After all, verification of a user’s information through government-issued ID is rare on the internet. Thus we cannot say that this feature was uniquely or unreasonably dangerous.
So, this decision is not the worst in the world, and it does seem targeted at a truly awful company. But poking a hole like this in Section 230 so frequently leads to others piling through that hole and widening it.
And one legitimate fear of a ruling like this is that it will actually harm efforts to get transparency in moderation practices, because the more companies say, the more liability they may face.
Filed Under: 9th circuit, anonymity, duty, duty of care, promises, promissory estoppel, section 230, terms of service
Companies: yolo
Comments on “In YOLO Ruling, Ninth Circuit Cracks Open Pandora’s Box For Section 230”
With all the attempts to get companies to be more transparent about their policies around moderation, we now have a ruling that could potentially incentivize them to be LESS transparent instead.
We’re gonna be seeing some very interesting word-gymnastics in ToS’es going forward, I think.
I’m… A bit uncertain how this is Pandora’s box here. I can see how there might be room for concern, but one of the reasons for a court system is to analyze, on a case-by-case basis, when and when precedent does not apply. Take for example the promise made by YOLO and the claim that Twitter made before.
The first is a promise because it implies that something will, if determined necessary, always occur: people who send harassing messages to others will be unmasked. If YOLO didn’t want to be obligated to uphold that promise, they should’ve added stipulations. But they didn’t. They gave an absolute “this will happen”, which in my reading is a definitive promise, and they can’t then ignore that obligation.
By contrast, when twitter says that it “believe[s] in free expression and believe[s] every voice has the power to impact the world,” it’s not making a promise. It’s making a statement of belief. From my reading there is no implication/correlation of causation here, in that belief in something does not equate to a promise or duty that something will occur as a result of that belief. If Twitter went on to say “[…] and we will ensure that you are always free to express yourself,” then that would be a promise. But unless I missed something, they didn’t, or if they did, there was always the condition that you follow the terms/conditions/rules of the platform attached to it. Thus, it would be a promise so long as the consumers end of the bargain was upheld. But as soon as the consumer broke that bargain, Twitter would forfeit all obligations to uphold their promise. At least, this is my interpretation to all of this. Obviously a court is free to disagree with me, and yes, it’s possible that a court could break this wide open and start seeing promises where there are none, or see unconditional “duties” where conditions are attached, but I hesitate to say that it definitively will happen. Not all courts are the fifth circuit, after all. Or SCOTUS. But who knows nowadays, given that even if a non-insane circuit rules appropriately on this, there’s no telling whether SCOTUS will just overturn it for political reasons. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text!
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A lot of unclear legal terms being left to future courts and opening up the law for bad faith rent seeking that drains the economy of productive output for years, and provides dozens of openings for higher courts to throw out existing liability protections in a Section 230 limiting ruling of a sort that dozens of politicians keep trying (and failing) to pass via legislation.
Most people don’t see the whole of the story of pandora’s box. The best answer is to not open the box/spill the toothpaste/take the genie out of the lamp. But once the box is opened, you cant go back, and the only way to Hope is to wade through the evils unleashed to make sure the box is empty, not to fall into despair the box was opened.
The claim doesn’t appear to be that this pandora’s box is the death of Section 230, just like the evils pandora’s box didn’t kill the good of the world. Rather, that opening pandora’s box unleashes a parade of horrible legislation that vexes and strains the ability of Section 230 to survive.
Perhaps, like in the myth, at the bottom of this box is hope for section 230. A legal environment where Section 230 is once again seen as a valuable protector against the evils of censorial judicial action, having weathered the slings and arrows of the complaints. Or Section 230 may be devoured by the evil, and shatter before it can be tempered. Which, we can not say.
Looks at the title
Well played, Mike. Well played.
Giggles uncontrollably
There's a lesson here -- not that it'll be learned
Don’t build something that you aren’t prepared to run.
Company after company has rushed out applications, services, web sites, products without even TRYING to think of how those will be abused and what they should do, starting at the design stage, to mitigate that abuse.
And then, because their egos and ambition and greed far outweigh their responsibility and ethics, they try to grow those operations as fast as possible — without a care in the world for what they break or who gets hurt or what gets destroyed.
Including Section 230. Let’s note that this lawsuit never happens if YOLO shows some basic competence and does what they said they’d do. And more importantly, the victims of YOLO’s clear, obvious, painful negligence never suffer if YOLO does what they said they’d do.
But I’m sure they don’t care. They’re too busy counting their money.
Because judges are just politicians in robes. I’m sure our Supreme Robed Politicians will set this right.
Peloton. Snoo. YOLO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZXeff7oBA
This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if legislative “reform” of Section 230 might actually be a good idea. It could be an opportunity to codify the better jurisprudence and spell out what extremely online policy wonks already know: The law protects everyone, not just giant corporations; there’s a great practical benefit to getting to the same place that the First Amendment goes but faster. A law that draws a line regarding “product liability”, or that somehow calls out creative pleading, might be better than the moral-panic-inflected rulings that we are seeing now.
N.B. I have no idea how to draft such a law; I am a theoretical physicist.
Of course, Congress is too corrupt to do anything useful. But if I were in the business of offering slivers of hope, I’d say that everyone hates “Big Tech” these days. Maybe, just maybe, the reasons they have for doing so aren’t always diametrically opposed. A law that locks in judicial precedent that even under Section 230 a company can be liable for its own faults might actually get a committee vote.
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I’d argue that the law is already as close to flawless as you can reasonably get, as demonstrated by the fact that there has yet to be an honest argument against it that doesn’t involve distorting or flat out lying about what it says, does, and/or why it was written.
Rather the problems seem to come from politicians and/or judges either reading into the law things that aren’t actually a part of it or ignoring parts that actually are in it, and a ‘reform’ would just give them an opportunity to codify both of those, gutting the law if not rendering it entirely useless.
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That’s the risk, for sure, and I wouldn’t want to downplay it. My concern is that the politicians in suits and the other politicians in robes are going to keep on “reading into the law things that aren’t actually a part of it or ignoring parts that actually are in it” — that seems practically a given. So, is there any way to take some air out of that balloon? How do we make the case that X is not part of the law and Y already is, in a way that harnesses the emotions of the moment? Can we harness the urge to punch Facebook repeatedly and turn that hostility into something that benefits tech policy?
A “reform” that amounts to saying “OK, Zeran and these other cases are now federal law” seems like a worthwhile thought-experiment, at least. If there’s going to be this hunger for “reform”, perhaps that option should be on the table. Politicians are always eager to be seen Doing Something; perhaps presenting them a Something can mitigate the hazards. Draw the teeth of the talking point that “it’s not the 1996 Internet any more”. And perhaps activists would feel more optimistic and energized if they can fight for a good thing, rather than desperately trying to prevent a terrible one.
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Literally, that is what precedent and the practice of common law are for. The key distinction between Statutory and Common law is that the common law is the incorporation of judicial opinions into the law. As the legal system currently exists, writing judicial opinions into federal law provides little in the way of extra protection from judicial fiat, which is what you are seeking. Nothing in the 9th circuit ruling would be undone by creating formal statutes out of SCTOUS rulings. The judiciary is just as capable of misreading legislation as they are precedent. More so, since misreading legislation doesn’t result in a superior providing a smackdown explaining why you are wrong.
The only legislative reason to create legislation out of a judicial ruling is to modify the existing common law. Either to fix a circuit split or fix judicial interpretation of the law outside the current understanding of legislative intent.
In the realm we had such proposed legislation simply incorporating existing judicial rulings, plenty of games could be played to no benefit. Incorporting the wrong rulings. Incorporating some rulings, but not others. Incorporating overturned rulings. Ignoring precedent with from higher authority. By the end activists are fighting the details just as hard as a bespoke reform bill, but now having to also explain why this legislation they “wanted” to create statute out of precedent is not good reform.
The best case scenario for the legislation you propose is status quo. Risking the death of 230 to be exactly where we now with the same threats to 230 seems like a stupid risk.
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There already is a “growing divergence between California federal vs. state courts about the interplay between Section 230 and promise-based claims”, and a split between the 3rd and 9th Circuits about intellectual property claims, and perhaps more that I’m not recalling at the moment. So, fixing disagreements among courts doesn’t seem out of the question as a motivation. And as for fixing “judicial interpretation … outside the current understanding of legislative intent”, isn’t that the situation we are in right now? We know the legislative intent, and ideologues are ignoring it in acts of blatant historical revisionism.
If that’s the choice, then I’d agree. I suspect, however, that the risk calculus may be different. The current path seems to be the death of 230 by a thousand judicial cuts, with outside chances of a total firebombing by legislation or by SCOTUS. In that context, a reform that would effectively “yes, and” the original law doesn’t sound like the worst idea.
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Am I going to start agitating for this? No. Would I read an article by tech-policy legal eagles that covered the topic? Sure. Could I see the value, in the right circumstances, of an advocacy group writing model legislation along these lines as a rhetorical maneuver? Possibly.
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Well, speaking of circuit splits… Oof.
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I agree. One of the things that I have been wanting organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight For The Future to do is write legislation as model bills and push to get them passed. I want them to go “Here, if you pass this then it will help curb the bad actors, individual and corporate, and make the Internet a better place”.
I just don’t think that a Section 230 status-quo that requires YOLO to be let off the hook legally is a good one or a stable one.
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That actually sounds like a really good idea. Maybe EFF and others should start sending their own ideas to lawmakers.
If other think-tanks and NGOs can do it, why shouldn’t they be able to?
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There are a few good arguments out there (mainly legal articles no one reads or cares about, not in pop culture). They’re just far and away buried by the garbage.
But ultimately, that’s what makes changing it so difficult. The misunderstandings are too common, it’d be incredibly risky. 230 is not perfect, but it’s far better than the likely outcome of any legislative push.
Honestly, the fact that we got it as is, is itself a bit of a fluke. We got incredibly lucky.
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Time to burn incense and pray we get that lucky again if that’s the case.
If they weren’t living up to those promises, was anything really lost? If companies are less transparent, that’s bad. But at the same time, if they’re transparent but not enforcing the thing they’re saying, that’s essentially just as useless. It’s not transparency if they aren’t actually doing the thing.
Having companies be held to their promises is not necessarily a bad thing on net, even if that has consequences about them being more careful with promises. Companies being able to make empty promises is itself extremely damaging to begin with. We have to be careful about being kneejerk against any sort of accountability just because that will have knockback consequences.
Personally, I think I’d rather have the accountability, if we had to choose. I don’t see much value in empty words.
I mean, would they be wrong to claim that? If you make a promise about something, and take it away, something was lost. But it should be fine, given that TOS’s say they can and will change at the companies’ discretion. So there was warning.
It wasn’t answered here because it doesn’t need to be, but it does seem there’s a pretty easy line for courts to adopt. They can just slap some sort of “reasonable interpretation” or whatever onto it. There’s always some anxiety until they actually get around to doing it, but it’s probably fine, for now.
That said, reading the decision, this seems to be because the case is still going forward: While it is certainly an open question whether YOLO has any defenses to enforcement of its promise, at this stage we cannot say that § 230 categorically prohibits Plaintiffs from making the argument. It seems like this boundary might get set as this gets further litigated.
The best way to avoid having holes poked into 230 would be for it to have clauses that would (not) cover these truly horrible cases to begin with. Just saying.
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No one can change Section 230 as it is now without fundamentally altering the entire law and changing the way the Internet as we know it works. No one who argues for changes to Section 230 has ever offered a reasonable argument for why those changes need to happen that doesn’t involve a misunderstanding of the law (intentional or accidental) and/or a bias against so-called Big Tech.
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Sure. And why is that a problem, exactly? Just because it’s a change doesn’t mean the change is bad. If the law is dysfunctional in some way, fundamentally altering it to fix that is not inherently a problem.
That said, in this particular case, it wouldn’t actually change it all that much, given that it’s mostly just tidying up already existing precedent under Barnes (I suppose one major difference is it would be federal instead of just 9th Circuit, but the 9th Circuit is already changing the internet, so it’s not clear that’s much of a change).
There’s no reason you couldn’t write an exception that hits something egregious like YOLO without destroying the web or the core of 230’s function.
I seem to recall giving you a few pretty recently, and not getting any argument back as for why they were unreasonable or involved a misunderstanding/bias.
But, staying on topic, why would a change that addresses this particular topic, involve misunderstanding the law, or be a bias against big tech? Even Mike isn’t complaining about the central ruling itself, but the side details left open (which could be addressed if this were legislation).
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Yes, something was lost because you think this solely is about the companies that was less than stellar with how they approached the problem.
You really can’t think beyond your limited horizon, ignoring every other company that handles these issues as good as they can, and they will change their rules for worse (from a user perspective) to avoid liabilities introduced by cases like these.
It always amazing when people like you barfs out their opinions about things like this, because it shows you don’t actually understand the actual problem even though it has been shouted into your face over and over again. Did it even occur to you that most ToS’ have clauses that absolve companies from a lot of the shit that falls outside 230?
And just to re-iterate the point you seem to miss, those who want to poke holes in 230 doesn’t actually care if the hole-poking is legally sound or not – they’ll just dogpile legal shit to see what sticks in a friendly court to make that hole.
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This was not “less than stellar”. YOLO seems to have just straight-up lied to people. There need to be actual legal consequences for lying to people like this and Section 230 shouldn’t be allowed to protect them.
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No, I’m not. That entire first section is talking about other types of companies, as well. Maybe I didn’t make that clear.
That is a loss/tradeoff. If a good company is unwilling to commit to something because of a potential liability, that is a loss. I’m just not sure that loss outweighs the gains in accountability elsewhere. That’s not ignoring it, that’s just not putting as much value into it as you are when evaluating the trade off.
There is value in having transparency from companies acting in good faith, it’s not nothing (although personally I weight it pretty low). But I’m not sure it’s more value than accountability when it’s needed (even for “good” companies). At the very least, you have to acknowledge there is a trade off, it’s not a clear win/win or lose/lose either way.
I think I lean more towards firm accountability, if I had to pick (although I would prefer a legislative solution that preserves both)
Yes. So what?
Feel free to point out what I supposedly don’t understand. Because so far your complaining seems to be based on assumptions of things I’m not actually saying.
Some will, some won’t. There are people who dislike the bad cases, without wanting to throw out the whole thing. Lumping them all into one category is just lazy strawmanning. It’s pretty reasonable for someone to dislike this particular case/outcome, while liking 230 overall.
Bug regardless, the point is, if you have a release valve for the more egregious downsides, that hole poking by bad actors becomes harder, because it makes it harder for them to get broader support. Which better safeguards 230 overall. Addressing those downsides directly makes the hole-poking harder, legally sound or otherwise. That’s a good thing all around.
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Disney+ has such policies.
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Agreed. YOLO lied to people. They need to be held legally accountable to the people they hurt. They shouldn’t be able to use Section 230 to hide away from legal consequences.
'Our new moderation rules can be summed up as 'Whatever we want to do'.'
Lesson learned: If you have a company in the 9th Circuit offer nothing specific or that might even be considered specific, and make your TOS and public statements as vague as possible so that you can’t be found to have violated your ‘promises’, and if people complain that that makes it hard to know what content is and is not a violation just point to rulings like this.
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Honestly pretty much what I predict will happen. Companies may be incentivized to say they’ll TRY to uphold certain moderation standards or actions, but never actually promise or commit to it in a way they can be held accountable with.
Could we see this case end up in the Supreme Court?
As almost mandatory, I have to ask: Does this spell doom for the internet as we know it, or just a new slew of legal headaches for all parties?
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Legal headaches it seems.
Everyone is awful in someone’s eyes.
Section 230 harms naive third parties more than the target of defamation.
If you’re an employer and you believe defamation you read on the internet, then hire the wrong person, you were defrauded by the defamer. The target actually benefits from this because the libel keeps idiots out of their lives. Think “Unlawful Entry” where Ray Liotta’s character frames Kurt Russell’s character for murder. The victim: his wife.
If someone does business with a con artist who defamed a rival, the customer suffers.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
And here comes the Third circuit saying “Hold my beer!” and comes out with an even more moronic ruling.