Hassell v. Bird
Issue
Whether a state court can enforce a defamation judgment by ordering Yelp — which was not a party to the underlying lawsuit — to remove reviews posted by the defendant from its platform.
What Happened
Attorney Dawn Hassell and her law group sued former client Ava Bird in San Francisco Superior Court for defamation, alleging that Bird authored two one-star Yelp reviews that were false and injurious. Plaintiffs deliberately chose not to name Yelp as a defendant, anticipating that doing so would allow Yelp to raise a § 230 defense. After Bird failed to appear, the trial court entered a default judgment and an injunction that (1) required Bird to remove the reviews, and (2) directed Yelp to remove the reviews from its website — even though Yelp had no notice of the suit, was not a party, and had no opportunity to be heard. Yelp, served with the judgment after the fact, objected and appealed. The California Supreme Court reversed the removal order against Yelp (4-3), in a plurality opinion. The lead opinion held that the order directing Yelp to remove third-party content it hosted treated Yelp as the "publisher or speaker" of that content — precisely what § 230(c)(1) prohibits. Even framed as an injunction rather than a damages judgment, the removal order imposed on Yelp an obligation arising from its role as the publisher of Bird's reviews. Because § 230(e)(3) preempts any state law that is "inconsistent with" § 230, the removal order could not stand. The court revised the injunction to remove the directive to Yelp.
Why It Matters
Established that § 230 preempts state court attempts to conscript non-party platforms into removing content through injunctions entered in litigation to which the platform was not a party. The decision is significant at the intersection of § 230, injunctions, and due process: a plaintiff cannot circumvent § 230 by obtaining a content-removal order against a platform without naming it as a defendant. The case is frequently cited in debates about procedural mechanisms for victims of online defamation to obtain meaningful relief.
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