TOS Formation Fails, and So Does Section 230–Judge v. Academia

The named plaintiff is a professor. The defendant is a website, Academia, that helps professors share their works publicly. Academia heavily promotes its “Mentions” service that tracks a professor’s mentions and citations. [Historically, I have used a variety of free services to track my vanity mentions. Most are gone or unreliable at this point, but I don’t think I would pay for this service]. New Academia accountholders will immediately get this email promotion: Clicking on the “View your Mention” button leads to this screen: In both cases, the fact statement that X mentioned Y is presumably true, and it provides a sample of how the Mentions service works for its subscribers. At the same time, it does use X’s name in what looks like advertisements to convert Y to a paying customer. This reminded me of Facebook’s sponsored stories, which similarly relayed a true fact statement (X bought an item from Y) in what was converted into a paid advertisement. Academia also targeted…