The judges refused to decide whether X could be sued for distributing sexually explicit videos of minors.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on May 18 abandoned an opportunity to consider liability protections for social media sites, refusing to take up a case on whether Company X could be sued for distributing sexually explicit videos of minors.
The controversial law at the center of this case, known as Section 230, is widely interpreted to protect websites from lawsuits over user-generated content.
Critics say lower courts are reading too much into the law’s text to protect internet platforms.
“Social media platforms are increasingly using Section 230 as a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2024 when he dissented from the court’s decision not to take the case over Snapchat.
A recently rejected appeal involved two teenage boys who thought they were communicating on Snapchat with a female student at their school. In reality, they were tricked by sex traffickers into blackmailing them into recording sexually graphic videos of themselves.
Three years later, the video started going viral on Twitter (now known as X). The company denied the minors’ requests to remove the posts and only removed them after the Department of Homeland Security got involved, according to the filing.
When the teens filed suit, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 prohibits pursuing X for distributing child pornography or profiting from sex trafficking. The court allowed other aspects of the case to move forward. But the victims, identified under pseudonyms in the lawsuit, asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the rejected claims.
“What makes this case different from others is that Twitter knew that criminal content involving John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 was proliferating on its platform,” the lawyers wrote in the appeal. “This case does not require courts to cover all cases to which Section 230 applies.”
In response, X’s lawyers said the case was the latest attempt to disrupt the interpretation of established law.
“Like others who have raised variations on the same argument, the petitioners fall short of justifying destabilizing measures,” they said.
