CONCORD, N.H. (Legal Newsline) - People who retweeted a slanderous post about a school teacher can’t be sued for libel, New Hampshire’s highest court ruled, affirming the sweeping protections for Internet services Congress established under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
While Section 230 is most commonly cited by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to protect themselves against lawsuits over content posted by their users, the word “user” in the law also applies to ordinary people who repost content produced by others.
“That individual users are immunized from claims of defamation for retweeting content that they did not create is evident from the statutory language,” the New Hampshire Supreme Court, in a May 11 decision.
Debbie Banaian sued Ann Bascom and others for defamation and infliction of emotional distress after they retweeted a picture of a Merrimack Valley Middle School website that a student had hacked to make it suggest the teacher was sexually perverted and interested in liaisons with students and their parents.
A trial court dismissed her lawsuit against the retweeters, citing Section 230. The law states “no users of an interactive computer service” will be treated as a publisher or speaker of information provided by someone else. The statute carved out an exception from normal defamation law, under which people can be sued for repeating defamatory information even if they didn’t create it themselves.
Banaian argued the word “user” in the statute was ambiguous and the title of Section 230(c), “Protection for `Good Samaritan’ blocking and screening of offensive material” suggested it referred only to information service providers.
Headings and titles aren’t equivalent to statutory text, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled, however, and neither is legislative history. As one California court put it, the word “user” “plainly refers to someone who uses something, and the statutory context makes it clear that Congress simply meant someone who uses an interactive computer service.”
“Despite the plaintiff’s assertion to the contrary, we conclude that it is evident that section 230 of the CDA abrogates the common law of defamation as applied to individual users,” the New Hampshire court concluded.