Website drives off with Section 230 win over Chevy dealer

Nemet Chevrolet sued the website Consumeraffairs.com over some posts on that website which Nemet thought were defamatory and interfered with Nemet’s business expectancy. The website moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the Communications Decency Act at 47 U.S.C. 230 immunized the website from the lawsuit.

The court dismissed the action on Section 230 grounds and Nemet sought review of the dismissal with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court affirmed the dismissal.

Section 230 precludes tort plaintiffs from holding interactive computer services (like website operators) liable for the publication of information created and developed by others. Most courts (like the Fourth Circuit) consider Section 230’s protection to be a form of immunity for website operators from lawsuits arising over third party content.

But that immunity disappears if the content giving rise to the dispute was actually created or developed by the operator and not by a third party. In those circumstances the operator also becomes an information content provider. And there is no Section 230 immunity for information content providers.

That’s where Nemet steered its argument. It alleged that the website was a non-immune information content provider that created and developed the offending content.

Nemet raised two general points in its argument. It claimed that the website’s structure and design elicited unlawful content, and that the site operator contacted individual posters to assist in revisions to the content. It also claimed that the site operator simply fabricated a number of the offending posts.

Applying the pleading standards on which the Supreme Court recently elaborated in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the court found Nemet’s claims that the site operator was actually an information content provider to be implausible.

As for the structure and design argument, the court differentiated the present facts from the situation in Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates. com. In Roommates.com, the court found that the website was designed to elicit information that would violate the Fair Housing Act. In this case, however, there was nothing unlawful in inviting commentary on goods or services, even if it was for the purposes of drumming up business for plaintiffs’ class action lawyers.

As for the other arguments, the court simply found that the allegations did not nudge the claims “across the line from conceivable to plausible.” The court found the argument that the website fabricated the posts to be particularly not creditable, in that Nemet’s allegations relied mainly on an absence of information in its own records that would connect the post to an actual customer.

On balance, this decision from the Fourth Circuit shows that Section 230 immunity is as alive and well at the end of the “oughts” as it was a dozen years before when the Fourth Circuit became the first federal appellate court to consider the scope of the section’s immunity. That 1997 decision in the case of Zeran v. AOL remains a watershed pronouncement of Section 230’s immunity.

Congratulations to my friend and fellow blogger Jonathan Frieden’s impressive win in this case.

And Happy New Year to all the readers of Internet Cases. Thanks for your continued loyal support.

Chevy Malibu photo courtesy Flickr user bea-t under this Creative Commons license.