We’ve seen some folks claim in the comments that Section 230 safe harbors go away if the person or company is involved in forwarding or posting the material of others — but courts have repeatedly held otherwise. Now we’ve got yet another such case, that actually has pretty a pretty similar story line to some previous lawsuits. Basically a guy forwarded an email to a mailing list, which someone claimed was defamatory — and they sued the guy who forwarded the email. But, once again, a court has found that the mere act of forwarding the email does not take away section 230 protections. The fact that the guy added a brief intro to the email also didn’t change this — though, the content of that intro could be reviewed for defamation (the court found there was none), since that was actually written by the guy.
Once again, this is exactly how Section 230 should act. It’s designed to make sure liability gets applied to the right party — the one actually making (for example) the defamatory remarks. Merely passing along what someone said shouldn’t have the liability passed on to you as well, and that’s exactly what the court found.
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