Rounding Up Three Recent Section 230 Decisions

I’m trying to clear my blogging queue that backlogged during my China trip. Here are three Section 230 decisions from the last few weeks.

Geegieh v. Unknown Parties, 2025 WL 1769766 (D. Ariz. June 26, 2025)

The plaintiff claims that Doe “Defendants accused Plaintiff of being a convicted felon and published private information about his family. Plaintiff repeatedly requested that X Corp. remove the content but it failed to do so.” X moved to dismiss.

To get around X’s 230 defense, “Plaintiff argues that his claim against X Corp., in
relevant part, is the failure to disclose the identities of the individuals allegedly defaming Plaintiff. The Court is not aware of any valid cause of action that would compel X Corp. to disclose information regarding its users to Plaintiff.”

Instead, “the claims alleged in the FAC and the refashioned claims in Plaintiff’s Response are best understood as attempts to hold X Corp. liable for its moderation practices, which also enjoy § 230 immunity….assuming for a moment that Plaintiff considered X Corp. the publisher or speaker under a state law claim, the information at issue is provided by other users on X Corp.’s platform. These facts would satisfy the § 230 immunity requirements and therefore preclude Plaintiff’s claims.”

Citing Moody and others, the court says X also has a meritorious First Amendment defense.

Huckabee v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2025 WL 1744357 (D. Del. June 24, 2025)

Prior blog post. I previously summarized the case:

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel. He claims that CBD advertisers featured his name, photo, and likeness in Facebook ads….As a result of these ads, allegedly “Governor Huckabee is now wrongly associated with the CBD industry.”

Huckabee sued Facebook for publicity rights violations and more. Facebook defended on Section 230. The District of Delaware court follows the Anderson v. TikTok case eliminating Section 230 in the Third Circuit, but nevertheless dismisses Huckabee’s case on the prima facie elements.

Huckabee asked for a reconsideration. In response, the court reiterates that Huckabee loses, but not because of Section 230.

Section 230

Given the reconsideration, Facebook argued the court got its prior Section 230 conclusion wrong. The court sticks to its position.

Facebook argued that the Anderson v. TikTok case only rejected Section 230 for content promotion, not content hosting, and Facebook is just hosting the scam ads. To be clear, my position is that the distinction between hosting and promotion is nonsensical–hosting is a form of content prioritization, so the line between hosting and promotion is illusory.

In any case, the court says that Huckabee sufficiently alleged that Facebook promoted the ads.

Further, the court said such a distinction wouldn’t help Facebook for [reasons I didn’t understand]. The court says “Immunity under Section 230 does not require that the underlying claims involve the promotion of the offending content. Nor does Section 230 immunity require parity between the grounds that inform immunity — here, the algorithmic decision-making that maximized the exposure of certain advertisements — and the allegations that inform the claims at issue — here, the allegations regarding Plaintiff’s state law claims.” Huh? Doesn’t this indicate that Section 230 should apply to both hosting and promotion? Or is the court saying that the Anderson opinion wiped out Section 230 for both hosting and promotion? That’s very clearly NOT what the Third Circuit said. However, because the Anderson opinion is trash, other courts are twisting themselves into logic pretzels trying to make it make sense.

Facebook also argued that the Arkansas publicity rights statute at issue in this case expressly says that it’s not an IP law for Section 230 purposes, thus expressly opting out Section 230’s exclusion for IP laws. (Note: I discussed what constitutes an “IP law” for Section 230 purposes in this piece). The court again responds in a confusing way: “neither Meta nor this Court may divine the scope of immunity under § 230 of the CDA, a federal statute, from § 1112(b) of the FBPPA, a state statute.” I guess the court is trying to say that if the Anderson ruling de facto repealed Section 230 in the Third Circuit, it doesn’t matter if the Arkansas legislature intended its publicity rights statute to be subject to it?

Publicity Rights Claim

Despite the Section 230 wipeout, Huckabee still loses on the prima facie elements.

In particular, the publicity rights statutory claim fails for lack of alleged scienter. Huckabee proposed to replead the scienter but he still can’t show Facebook knew of the alleged violation:

the alleged “review systems” and “ample opportunities” to “detect … misappropriated … images” amount to a “sheer possibility” that Meta knew of the misappropriation. Stated otherwise, the alleged “review systems” and “ample opportunities” are “merely consistent” with Plaintiff’s theory of scienter and stop “short of the line between possibility and plausibility of entitlement to relief.”…

that Meta reviews the accuracy of advertisements does not support the “reasonable inference” that Meta had the requisite scienter of misappropriation…

that Facebook, “one of the most dominant social media companies in the world,” has previously published a handful of images that were used without authorization hardly allows for the reasonable inference that Meta knew that the images of Plaintiff were also used without authorization…

the alleged failure of Meta to obtain [Huckabee’s] consent, where Meta is providing a forum in which the content is posted and employing an algorithm to determine the placement of that content, does not support a reasonable inference of Meta’s knowledge of misappropriation. Otherwise, Meta would be required, improvidently, to obtain the consent of the owner of every image on Facebook before posting content with that image.

Loveless v. Stiles, 2025 WL 1825553 (S.C. App. Ct. July 2, 2025)

This case involves a Facebook group “Deep Dive in D5,” which self-describes its purpose as “to share factual information about School District 5 of Lexington and Richland counties.” Loveless is a board member of the school district. Stiles is a group administrator.

The court says Stiles is not legally responsible for third-party statements posted to the group:

The CDA and its progeny of cases make clear that Stiles, as an information content provider, has no liability for other users’ statements…

We agree with Loveless that this case is slightly distinguishable from Zeran because Stiles posted both her own statements and was the administrator of the page where third-party statements were posted. However, we find this distinction does not remove the protections of the CDA as to the third-party statements.