Earlier this month, in Domen v. Vimeo, Inc.,1 a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a relatively unused subpart of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA)—namely, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(2)(A)—immunized an online platform (Vimeo) from a lawsuit brought by users who complained that the platform had wrongfully deleted their content and banned them from using the platform. The result of this ruling—termination at the motion-to-dismiss stage of a lawsuit against an online platform based on its decisions, actions or inactions relating to the moderation of third-party content—is fully in line with rulings from legions of courts across the country that have applied Section 230 as a source of very broad immunities for online platforms.2 But the ruling is groundbreaking in one respect: It is the first reported case in nearly 20 years in which an appellate court has held that § 230(c)(2)(A)—which prohibits holding online platforms liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith” to block or remove material that the platform “considers to be . . . objectionable”—can and should operate to bar such claims at the threshold pleading stage.3 The ruling is also consistent with statutory and policy…
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Second Circuit Affirms Broad Immunity for Online Providers to Remove Third-Party Content from …
