A California state appellate court sided with Twitter and put a halt to a lawsuit filed against the social media service by white nationalist Jared Taylor. In the lawsuit, Taylor alleges he was wrongly banned from Twitter in December 2017 when Twitter permanently suspended Taylor and his publication, American Renaissance, soon after it announced a crackdown on “violent extremist groups.” In his lawsuit, Taylor claimed that the Twitter account suspensions violated several California laws, including one dealing with unfair business practices.
Twitter first sought dismissal of the case under California’s anti-SLAPP law. Twitter argued the lawsuit implicated its First Amendment right to decide what content to allow on its platform and that the company has the right to suspend accounts at any time. During a hearing on the dismissal motion in June of 2018, the trial court judge questioned Twitter’s lawyer about whether that position was consistent with prior statements by executives who had previously called the company the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” The judge also felt that Twitter’s position that it can suspend accounts at will may be “unconscionable” or too unfair to be enforceable. The judge ultimately rejected Twitter’s bid to dismiss the suit and issued a formal order allowing the matter to proceed.
Twitter sought a writ of mandate from the appeals court—an extraordinary request which courts almost always refuse to grant. Yet, surprisingly, California’s First Appellate District granted Twitter’s request (and in fact did so without even first inviting a response from the plaintiff). The appellate court maintained that 47 USC 230 (Section 230), a federal law enacted in 1996 (otherwise known as the Communications Decency Act) protects Twitter from liability for decisions about what content to allow on the service. Section 230 has two key provisions: §230(c)(1) provides that websites are not liable for third-party content, while §230(c)(2) indictaes websites are not liable for their filtering decisions.
In its decision, the appellate court (correctly) treated the Taylor case as a Section 230 case. This is overall consistent with the modern legal trend post-Sikhs for Justice “SFJ”, Inc. v. Facebook, Inc., 2015 WL 7075696 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 13, 2015). The appellate court viewed this as an issue involving users’ posts as third-party content to Twitter, thus applying §230(c)(1) instead of §230(c)(2). The only 230(c)(1) element at issue was whether the claim treats Twitter as a “publisher.” The appellate court stated that “California courts have held that a service provider’s decision...
