Anyone who operates a website can be construed as operating an interactive computer service as he is providing computer access by multiple users to the computer server on which his website resides and Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996, provides that 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 nor shall they be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to the material described above.
What this means in English is anyone who operates a website, pursuant to that Act, may be immune to claims other than criminal law claims or federal intellectual property law claims such as tort claims for defamation for material published on his site so long as the website owner is not the originator of the offending information.
However, a website owner could lose his immunity if he (1) promises on the the site to remove objectionable content and then fails to do so, (2) the publisher of the objectionable content is an employee or agent of the web site owner, thereby making the publisher not “another information content provider,” (3) violates another statute by requiring visitors to provide information unlawful under that statute as a condition of service, e.g., requiring certain personal information in violation of the Fair Housing Act, (4) the web site owner inserts offensive content, even if he does so only in the process of editing the original third-party content, (5) the web site owner actively solicits or encourages submission of the offensive content,
