Last week, TechFreedom filed an amicus brief urging the New York State’s highest court to affirm an appellate court’s ruling that online service providers do not lose First Amendment and Section 230 protections by using algorithms to implement editorial judgments at the scale of the Internet. The brief explains why Section 230 is essential to the modern Internet and why weakening or eliminating those protections would be a catastrophic mistake.

“The lawsuit attempts to flout Section 230’s protection of publishing,” said Andy Jung, AI Policy Counsel at TechFreedom. “Under Section 230, a website is protected from liability for posting, removing, arranging, and otherwise organizing third-party content. In other words, Section 230 protects a website as it fulfills any traditional publisher role. And one of Section 230’s stated purposes is to ‘promote the continued development of the Internet’—so the statute plainly envisions the protection of new, technology-driven publishing tools. Minors use social media because it presents speech they’re interested in seeing.” 

“The supposedly ‘addictive’ features being challenged are nothing more than publishing decisions,” Jung concluded. “The lawsuit wrongly recast publishing decisions as product design choices. But so-called ‘addictive’ features like autoplay and infinite scroll are editorial decisions protected by Section 230. These features are nothing more than digital methods of making editorial choices about how to display user-generated material. Federal courts of appeals have consistently recognized that such choices fall within Section 230. Presenting content in a way that engages users is part and parcel of publishing. To hold otherwise would turn Section 230 on its head by stripping immunity from websites for becoming too effective at the very publishing functions the statute protects.”

The case is Patterson v. Meta Platforms, Inc., APL-2025-00158 (N.Y. Ct. App.).

###

Find this brief and release on our website, and share it on Twitter and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Read our related work, including:

About TechFreedom:

TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.

</>