Section 230 Blocks Lawsuits That “Meddle” With Online Publishers’ Editorial Decisions–Shared v. Meta

The Ninth Circuit’s Section 230 jurisprudence has dev0lved into a drama-filled implosion, so it’s shocking (in a refreshing way) when the Ninth Circuit nowadays issues a normal, straight-down-the-middle Section 230 opinion without any caveats, tricks, or angst. I have a blogging backlog of many other Section 230 cases that I hope to cover before year-end, but I’m fast-tracking this one because of its novelty. * * * This is an account termination/content removal case, so you already know the plaintiff is going to lose–the only question is how. Shared allegedly “creates and publishes original, timely, and entertaining [online] content.” It ran Facebook pages that, at one point, had 25M followers. Shared heavily used Facebook’s self-service advertising, placing over 500,000 ads. Facebook rejected over 18,000 of those ads. The court says “Shared regularly relied on ‘scammy’ ads and ‘blatant clickbait.'” Here is an example of one of their rejected ads: This ad showed Luke Wilson next to a…