Judge tosses home contractor's suit against Nextdoor over mean online comments

A federal judge ruled today a contractor who says he lost business due to a disgruntled customer's repeated online disparagement has no case against Nextdoor, which provides neighborhood-based online forums, because of a federal law that protects online sites from lawsuits over content posted by their users.

In his ruling, US District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton said that because the law, known as Section 230, mainly supersedes state law, he had to dismiss Duffer's claims under Massachusetts law as well, because none of the claims fell under the exceptions allowed by the federal law - which was designed to keep online forums from being legally treated as "publishers" responsible for all the words that appear on their pages written by people not owning or working for the forums.

In his suit, filed in December, Duffer argued Nextdoor still should have removed all the postings because its user contract prohibited false and defamatory posts, , such as the ones he claimed a woman upset over his work on a fence kept posting - at one point vowing to keep doing so until he was driven out of business. He said Nextdoor finally did take some action after three weeks of complaints, but by then the damage had been done.

Gorton said the very thing Duffer wanted Nextdoor to do - remove the posts - was "a traditional editorial function" performed by a content publisher and so Duffer had no case because the law says Nextdoor is not a publisher.

Duffer had sought at least $115,000 - $15,000 for the four contracts he says other customers canceled after reading the woman's posts and $100,000 for the value of the business he used to do based on his own Nextdoor postings. After the blowup, Duffer moved from Middlesex County to Montana.