Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1284_869d.pdf
Page Number: 8

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MALWAREBYTES, INC. v. ENIGMA SOFTWARE 
GROUP USA, LLC 
Statement of THOMAS, J. 

Inc. v. Facebook, Inc., 697 Fed. Appx. 526 (CA9 2017), aff ’g
144 F. Supp. 3d 1088, 1094 (ND Cal. 2015) (concluding that
“ ‘ any activity that can be boiled down to deciding whether 
to exclude material that third parties seek to post online is
perforce immune’ ” under §230(c)(1)). 

D 
Courts  also  have  extended  §230  to  protect  companies
from a broad array of traditional product-defect claims.  In 
one case, for example, several victims of human trafficking
alleged that an Internet company that allowed users to post 
classified ads for “Escorts” deliberately structured its web-
site  to  facilitate  illegal  human  trafficking.    Among  other
things,  the  company  “tailored  its  posting  requirements  to 
make  sex  trafficking  easier,”  accepted  anonymous  pay-
ments, failed to verify e-mails, and stripped metadata from
photographs to make crimes harder to track.  Jane Doe No. 
1 v. Backpage.com, LLC, 817 F. 3d 12, 16–21 (CA1 2016).
Bound  by  precedent  creating  a  “capacious  conception  of
what it means to treat a website operator as the publisher 
or speaker,” the court held that §230 protected these web-
site design decisions and thus barred these claims.  Id., at 
19; see also M. A. v. Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC, 809 
F. Supp. 2d 1041, 1048 (ED Mo. 2011). 

Consider also a recent decision granting full immunity to
a company for recommending content by terrorists.  Force 
v. Facebook, Inc., 934 F. 3d 53, 65 (CA2 2019), cert. denied,
590 U. S. —— (2020).  The court first pressed the policy ar-
gument that, to pursue “Congress’s objectives, . . . the text 
of Section 230(c)(1) should be construed broadly in favor of
immunity.”  934  F. 3d,  at  64.  It  then  granted  immunity,
reasoning  that  recommending  content  “is  an  essential  re-
sult  of  publishing.”  Id.,  at  66.  Unconvinced,  the  dissent 
noted  that,  even  if  all  publisher  conduct  is  protected  by
§230(c)(1),  it  “strains  the  English  language  to  say  that  in