Citation Network of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: A Validated Corpus of Published Federal Circuit Appellate Holdings, 1997–2025

Citation Network of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: A Validated Corpus of Published Federal Circuit Appellate Holdings, 1997–2025 | Zenodo Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up Zenodo is currently experiencing slowness and intermittent outages due to heavy automated traffic from bots and AI crawlers. We are aware of the problem, and our team is focused on stabilizing the service. Thank you for your patience. There is a newer version of the record available. Published May 6, 2026 | Version v2 Dataset Open Citation Network of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: A Validated Corpus of Published Federal Circuit Appellate Holdings, 1997–2025 Authors/Creators Matthew, Cates 1 Show affiliations 1.

University of Georgia Description This deposit provides the data and code for a computational legal study of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230). It includes a validated corpus of 69 published federal circuit opinions that substantively applied § 230 immunity doctrine between 1997 and 2025, the citation network constructed from those opinions (69 nodes, 357 directed edges), all derived network metrics, and the complete analysis pipeline. Version 2 correction: Version 1 contained 70 corpus cases and 360 edges. Version 2 removes CourtListener cluster 3048087, a superseded pre-amendment panel opinion in Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC (filed March 28, 2007), which was superseded by the amended opinion at cluster 3048873 (filed May 30, 2007), reported at 488 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir. 2007). All analysis data files have been regenerated against the corrected 69-case, 357-edge corpus. The corpus was constructed by retrieving 211 candidate opinions from CourtListener and subjecting each to systematic human review against a documented operative inclusion criterion and a ten-pattern exclusion taxonomy. The false positive rate in automated retrieval was 67.3% ((211 - 69) / 211), a methodological finding with implications for corpus construction in empirical legal studies. Corpus recall was 1.0 (95% Wilson CI: 0.960-1.000) based on a stratified sample of 19 cases across five temporal strata. Key findings: citation authority concentrates in Zeran v. America Online, Inc. , 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997), which holds PageRank 0.202, accounting for 20.2% of total network authority; the Leiden algorithm identifies 6 communities (mean NMI stability = 0.672 across 100 seeds); mean pairwise Jensen-Shannon divergence between circuits is 0.654 bits, increasing from 0.519 bits in 2003 to 0.654 bits in 2025 with no convergence event; mutual information between community membership and immunity outcome is 0.155 bits (NMI = 0.124, permutation test p = 0.023, n = 10,000 permutations, seed 42); Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, LLC , 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008), holds the highest betweenness centrality in the corpus (BC = 0.019) while ranking fifth by PageRank. All data and code are provided to support full reproduction of all analyses. See README_ZENODO.md for the complete file inventory and replication_guide.md for step-by-step reproduction instructions. Files s230-citation-network-main.zip Files (181.7 kB) Name Size Download all s230-citation-network-main.zip md5:d97be55d168e5d356b1fddfb655062f2 181.7 kB Preview Download Additional details Related works Is supplement to Software: https://github.com/mtcates-lab/s230-citation-network/tree/v1.0.2 (URL) Dates Submitted 2026-05-02 Software Repository URL https://github.com/mtcates-lab/s230-citation-network Programming language Python Development Status Active 94 Views 18 Downloads Show more details All versions This version Views Total views 94 47 Downloads Total downloads 18 5 Data volume Total data volume 5.8 MB 908.4 kB More info on how stats are collected.... Versions External resources Available in mtcates-lab/s230-citation-network Release: v1.0.2 Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Keywords and subjects Keywords section 230 citation network computational law empirical legal studies legal network analysis Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20055182 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20055182) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.20055182.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20055182 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20055182"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.20055182.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.20055182.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20055182 Resource type Dataset Publisher Zenodo Languages English Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. Read more Citation Export Technical metadata Created May 6, 2026 Modified May 6, 2026 Jump up About About Policies Infrastructure Principles Projects Roadmap Contact Blog Blog Support Help FAQ Developers REST API OAI-PMH Contribute GitHub Donate Funded by Powered by CERN Data Centre & InvenioRDM Status Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms of Use This site uses cookies. Find out more on how we use cookies Accept all cookies Accept only essential cookies

Related documents

• 2 U.S.C. § 4901 — Congressional pages#557708
• Lawful but Awful: Evolving Legislative Responses to Address Online Misinformation, Disinformation, and Mal-Information in the Age of Generative AI#1091607
• A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States#335745
• 22 U.S.C. § 2521a — Nonpartisan appointments#579265
• 22 U.S.C. § 10301 — United States international cyberspace policy#577576