The Wikimedia Foundation has cosigned an amicus brief in the Patterson v. Meta case, which is currently before the New York Appellate Division in the US. In its brief, the Foundation contends that this decision creates a dilemma for online platforms, forcing them to choose between excessive censorship or allowing harmful content—undermining the protections granted by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), which was designed to encourage content moderation and protect free speech.
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The Wikimedia Foundation cosigned an amicus (or “friend-of-the-court”) brief in the Patterson v. Meta case, now before the New York Appellate Division in the US. After a racially motivated shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, which was livestreamed online, several lawsuits were filed against the shooter, the supermarket chain, and social media platforms that hosted the livestream, arguing that the latter did not do enough to curb the dissemination of hate speech.
In the wake of this tragedy, which took the lives of 10 people, plaintiffs argued that social media services and internet messaging platforms in general should be considered products under the law, and also that the companies who own them are product sellers. Hence, these platforms could be held legally responsible according to the legal principle of product liability for a defect in their designs. Under the current well-established laws of the United States (i.e., Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act) social media platforms are not responsible for content posted by third parties.
However, the District Court of Buffalo, who first heard the case, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and determined that their product liability argument could continue to more advanced stages in the litigation process. The court ruled that it would be too early to dismiss this lawsuit just based on Section 230.
In our brief, we argued that if Section 230 no longer applied for social media platforms, it may create confusion and invite lawsuits that this legislation was meant to prevent. The amount of information communicated via interactive computer services is immense, making it impossible for service providers to screen each and every one of their millions of postings for possible concerns. We argued that, on the one hand, abandoning all curation will render the internet an effectively unnavigable wasteland. On the other hand, excessive content curation will suppress marginalized views and voices. Each option stands to impair the internet’s vibrancy and utility, ultimately eroding online speech and slowly but surely eliminating open and free online spaces.
Section 230 provides the legal protective framework upon which the Wikimedia projects rely. With the volunteer community contributing more than 20,000 edits per hour in a vast number of languages to Wikipedia alone, the Foundation has neither the resources nor the desire to adopt an editorial role and scrutinize each and every edit. Should the Foundation or any other service provider be found legally responsible for every piece of content posted by users, maintaining the projects would be close to impossible, as compliance and legal costs alone would already prove to be too burdensome. Should Section 230 be repealed, only the largest commercial platforms might be able to continue operating online, and the dream of a free and open online knowledge ecosystem would cease to exist.
The Wikimedia projects are created, maintained, and updated by the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who edit and interact on the projects to serve the public interest. If you want to learn more about Section 230 and how its disappearance would affect the internet as whole, please explore our Medium blog post series on the topic.
We would like to thank our cosigners to this brief, Chamber of Progress and Engine Advocacy, for their work and support in educating the courts about the potential consequences of their rulings.
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