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

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 70 published federal circuit and Supreme Court opinions that substantively applied § 230 immunity doctrine between 1997 and 2025, the citation network constructed from those opinions (70 nodes, 360 directed edges), all derived network metrics, and the complete analysis pipeline.

The corpus was constructed by retrieving 211 candidate opinions from CourtListener and subjecting each to systematic review against a documented operative inclusion criterion and a ten-pattern exclusion taxonomy. The false positive rate in automated retrieval was 66.8%, a methodological finding with implications for corpus construction in empirical legal studies. Corpus recall was 100% (95% Wilson CI: 0.960–1.000) based on a stratified sample of 19 cases.

Key findings: authority is concentrated in Zeran v. AOL (PageRank = 0.202); the network contains 19 Leiden communities (mean NMI stability = 0.686 across 100 seeds); mean pairwise Jensen-Shannon divergence between circuits is 0.65; mutual information between community membership and immunity outcome is NMI = 0.122.

All data and code are provided to support full reproduction of all analyses. See README_ZENODO.md for complete file inventory and replication_guide.md for step by step reproduction instructions.