All those cases were against the people who actually said something (supposedly) defamatory. The precedent here is that merely sharing a link to something somebody else wrote now also qualifies as defamation.
Singapore has an opposite standard for public figures. In the US you can defame or libel public figures and our precedent considers first amendment concerns to be exculpatory in most circumstances. E.g. I can say "Cillary Hinton killed Beffery Jepstein" without being held liable for defamation, although if I made the same type of accusation against a nonpublic figure like my neighbor that caused actual damages, I could be lose my shirt in any state court for defamation. I could also be held liable for defamation if I was merely restating what I had heard elsewhere or read in a libelous article. That is not a valid defense. There have indeed been defamation cases involving Facebook posts that resulted in substantial judgments or costly settlements here in the US (example: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/facebook_comment_lea...)
As some others have said, just because another country has different standards around a body of law doesn't necessarily mean that their interpretation is right and ours is wrong. The American interpretation of the first amendment and its applicability to defamatory statements against public figures could change, and it wasn't the same as it is now in previous eras of American history. NYT v. Sullivan is not the Constitution or one of the tablets handed down to Moses: it's a lot easier to reverse.
and that case was a statement, not a reshare.
Also, the parties to the lawsuit were involved in a dispute over control of a business, making it more complicated.
There is an innocent dissemination defense [1], but that requires you to show you did due diligence to avoid defamation.
> 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.
This applies to users who quote or forward a message as well as to sites that host a message. But there are some exceptions to section 230, and law is complex, so I may have missed something about defamation.
Section 230 is like one sentence, btw. It’s interpretation has a long and complex history now though.
“ under a plain reading of the statute it is clear that retweeting falls within the confines of Section 230’s immunity [...] Unsurprisingly, Reid’s attorneys signaled that she intended to argue just that in response to the complaint filed against her. Faced with the prospect of this hurdle, the plaintiff promptly dropped Reid’s retweet cause of action from the suit, although she has maintained her claims against Reid for allegedly false statements made after the retweet.“
It absolutely does reply to users foe actions which merely effect the visibility of materials others have posted, like simple retweets, provided they have an arms-length relationship with the original poster (if they actively solicited the submission and then retweeted it, that’s potentiallt different.)
Aside: retweeting doesn't obviously expose a URL, but in the similar scenario of dissemination by actual URL, I wonder if slugs therein would change things because then the downstream participant is actually themselves writing defamatory words (but I guess since the upstream participant specified those words first, even that is merely quoting existing info, not writing new info).
It doesn’t.
It says that in certain cases, they would by so doing be liable as a publisher of thr defamatory content.
> but section 230 says an individual can do so without repercussions
Section 230, with some exceptions, says that neither the service provider nor other users will be consider publishers of material submitted by a user. So, any liability they would have as the publisher of that material does bot exist, so long as the other conditions set for Section 230 safe harbor apply.
Could upvoting this hackernews article count as defamation? It's not the same as sharing it, but it would still make the original article more visible to more people.
If the individual in question shared the link with a disparaging comment then they would have most likely been fine.
I'm not necessarily defending the use of defamation law here just commenting on how it might analysed in law. IANAL :)