How does defamation law intersect with section 230?

> 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.

This applies to users who quote or forward a message as well as to sites that host a message. But there are some exceptions to section 230, and law is complex, so I may have missed something about defamation.

It does not apply to users who make such actions. Only to the service provider.

Section 230 is like one sentence, btw. It’s interpretation has a long and complex history now though.

According to https://www.foxrothschild.com/publications/where-retweeting-...

“ under a plain reading of the statute it is clear that retweeting falls within the confines of Section 230’s immunity [...] Unsurprisingly, Reid’s attorneys signaled that she intended to argue just that in response to the complaint filed against her. Faced with the prospect of this hurdle, the plaintiff promptly dropped Reid’s retweet cause of action from the suit, although she has maintained her claims against Reid for allegedly false statements made after the retweet.“

> It does not apply to users who make such actions. Only to the service provider.

It absolutely does reply to users foe actions which merely effect the visibility of materials others have posted, like simple retweets, provided they have an arms-length relationship with the original poster (if they actively solicited the submission and then retweeted it, that’s potentiallt different.)

So if defamation law says an individual cannot disseminate information written by others, but section 230 says an individual can do so without repercussions, which of those takes precedence?

Aside: retweeting doesn't obviously expose a URL, but in the similar scenario of dissemination by actual URL, I wonder if slugs therein would change things because then the downstream participant is actually themselves writing defamatory words (but I guess since the upstream participant specified those words first, even that is merely quoting existing info, not writing new info).

> So if defamation law says an individual cannot disseminate information written by others

It doesn’t.

It says that in certain cases, they would by so doing be liable as a publisher of thr defamatory content.

> but section 230 says an individual can do so without repercussions

Section 230, with some exceptions, says that neither the service provider nor other users will be consider publishers of material submitted by a user. So, any liability they would have as the publisher of that material does bot exist, so long as the other conditions set for Section 230 safe harbor apply.

The same way DMCA 512 intersects with contributory copyright infringement. The only difference is that CDA 230 has no notice-and-takedown regime for defamatory content.