> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
The law is specifically written for that case, as noted in my excerpt. AOL had a contract allowing them to censor their contractor’s work, did not censor it (although they did moderate and censor various content on their service), and was still held immune from liability.
The CDA basically grants publishers the ability to have their cake and eat it too, so you’d need to change the law.
Did you ever use AOL? It was similar to a website today. There was a search feature, you could view content on it, and so on. They exercised editorial judgment and removed content. Nevertheless, they were found immune from liability for a piece of third party content on their service that they did not remove.
Just follow the link and look up the various legal cases if you want to know more.
The whole point of the law was to allow the websites an option between "total prevetted lockdown" and "spam and gross out filled anarchy because anything not forbidden by law is permitted". It may have been for prudish intentions but there is a reason that was the only section of the CDA to survive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."