Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997), is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit determined the immunity of Internet service providers for wrongs committed by their users under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The statute states that "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."
The Fourth Circuit held that plaintiff Kenneth Zeran's claims of malfeasance by America Online were barred by the statute, holding that Section 230 "creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service."
Facts
On April 25, 1995, six days after the Oklahoma City bombing, a message was anonymously posted on the America Online (AOL) "Michigan Military Movement" bulletin board advertising items with slogans glorifying the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. These items included slogans such as, "Visit Oklahoma ... It's a BLAST!!!", "Putting the kids to bed ... Oklahoma 1995", and "McVeigh for President 1996". At this point, Zeran's house was placed under protective surveillance, and he was unable to use his telephone for his home business, as the threatening calls were coming in approximately every two minutes. This continued until at least May 15, by which time the number of calls fell to approximately 15 per day. In this case, since AOL did not dispute its knowledge of the defamatory statements, Zeran claimed to have grounds for alleging AOL's participation in the defamation of his character. In response to this claim, AOL argued that Section 230, which was passed in 1996, preempted the New York ruling, which was issued in 1991 and based on that state's law at the time. which states that "a court must ... determine whether Congress has clearly expressed [a] statute's intended temporal reach." and Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. Such a distinction was made in those rulings, but the court held that Zeran "misapprehends... the significance of that distinction for the legal issue we consider here."