Zeran v. America Online, Inc.

Issue: Whether § 230(c)(1) bars a distributor liability claim against an online service provider that had notice of defamatory third-party postings and allegedly failed to remove them promptly.

On April 25, 1995 — six days after the Oklahoma City bombing — an anonymous user posted messages on AOL bulletin boards advertising offensive T-shirts related to the bombing and listing Kenneth Zeran's home phone number as the contact for orders. Zeran began receiving a high volume of angry and threatening calls. He notified AOL, which assured him the posting would be removed but refused to post a retraction. Over the following days, new postings appeared with additional slogans and Zeran's number, including a message urging people to "please call back if busy due to high demand." By April 30, Zeran was receiving an abusive call approximately every two minutes. An Oklahoma City radio station broadcast the message, triggering a flood of death threats. Zeran sued AOL for negligence and distributor liability, arguing that AOL was liable because it knew of the defamatory material and failed to act expeditiously. The Fourth Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Wilkinson, affirmed dismissal. The court held that § 230(c)(1)'s language — "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" — bars all claims premised on a platform's role in publishing third-party content, including notice-based distributor liability. The court reasoned that Congress enacted § 230 precisely to override Stratton Oakmont and to create robust immunity so that platforms could host third-party content without incurring liability simply by knowing of it.

The landmark foundational decision interpreting § 230. Zeran held that § 230 creates complete immunity from any claim that treats a platform as the publisher or speaker of third-party content — including the distributor liability theory that would arise from notice of defamatory material. The Fourth Circuit's broad reading has been adopted by virtually every circuit court to address the question. Zeran remains the controlling interpretive framework and the starting point for nearly every § 230 analysis in the decades since.