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The Communications Decency Act or “CDA”, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1), states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Because the information supplied to this list is authored by users of VMS Accelerator’s, Inc. site, we cannot be legally regarded as the “publisher or speaker” of that information. The same law applies to sites like Facebook or GlassDoor – users who post information on these sites are responsible for what they write, but the operators of the sites are not. This is also consistent with our website Terms of Use.
The reasons for this law are to protect free speech and to encourage the availability of information on the Internet. See generally Batzel v. Smith, 333 F.3d 1018, 1027-28 (9th Cir. 2003) (recognizing, “Making interactive computer services and their users liable for the speech of third parties would severely restrict the information available on the Internet.”). See also Caraccioli v. Facebook, Inc., 167 F. Supp.3d 1056, 1065 (N.D. Cal. 2016) (purpose of CDA immunity is “to spare interactive computer service providers the ‘grim choice’ of becoming fully responsible for third-party content” by permitting them some ability to edit third-party content without also becoming liable for all defamatory or otherwise unlawful messages that they do not edit or delete.) We cannot possibly monitor the accuracy of the huge volume of information we are receiving for this list. If interactive websites were liable for information that the site did not create, this would restrict free speech, as fewer and fewer sites would be willing to permit users to post anything at all.