On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Yet Wikimedia gets email from (people claiming to be) the attorneys of companies and people that the projects have written about, demanding that articles be taken down or changed with some regularity, but as far as I can tell their demands are not met with some regularity. Wikinews, in particular, contains a lot of non-neutral and highly opinionated material. I've complained about WN on the lists a number of times. The articles posted to Wikileaks were, in my somewhat considered opinion, far closer to non-libelous than some other material on WN, but this is the first time that I'm aware of the WMF directing the users to remove an article due to concerns like this. (Thats not to say that it hasn't happened before, ... such things don't tend to leave obvious public records). The CDA argument is completely spurious. As Mike said, the case law says otherwise (Zeran v. AOL). The theory that service providers must be totally hands-off in order to retain immunity is a common piece of slashdot armchair lawyer idiocy. Usually they chalk it up to "common carrier status" but now it seems to be fashionable to chalk it up to CDA 230. The irony is that CDA 230 is a big part of the reason why that isn't true. One of the biggest effects CDA 230 had was reversing the judicial trend assigning responsibility for posts to providers who perform any form of moderation (For example, Stratton-Oakmont & Porush v. Prodigy which is no longer good law). Today, if the provider didn't have knowledge of the libelous material posted by a user then you shouldn't expect them to be held liable no matter how censorious, non-neutral, or even sloppy they are. Moderation, including incomplete or incompetent moderation, doesn't break the immunity provided by S. 230.