Can social media companies be sued for sexual videos? Supreme Court weighs in
The justices declined to decide whether X can be sued over the distribution of sexually explicit videos of minors.
Maureen GroppeWASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on May 18 passed up a chance to review liability protections for social media sites, declining to take a case about whether X Corp. can be sued over the distribution of sexually explicit videos of minors.
The controversial law at the center of the case, known as Section 230, has been widely interpreted as shielding websites from lawsuits for user-generated content.
Critics say that lower courts have read too much protection for internet platforms into the words of the law.
"Social-media platforms have increasingly used Section 230 as a get-out-of-jail free card," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2024 when he disagreed with the court’s decision not to take a case about Snapchat.
The latest rejected appeal concerned two teenage boys who thought they were interacting on Snapchat with a girl at their school. In reality, they say, they were being tricked by sex traffickers who blackmailed them into recording sexually graphic videos of themselves.
Three years later, the videos began circulating on Twitter, now X. The company rejected requests by the minors to remove the posts, doing so only after the Department for Homeland Security got involved, according to filings.
When the teenagers sued, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 barred them from going after X for distributing child pornography or for benefiting from sex trafficking. The court did allow other aspects of the lawsuit to move forward. But the victims, identified in the lawsuit by pseudonyms, asked the Supreme Court to review the dismissed claims.
"What makes this case different than others is that Twitter knew that criminal content involving John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 was proliferating on its platform," their lawyers wrote in the appeal. "This case does not require the Court to exhaust all instances in which Section 230 applies."
In response, lawyers for X described the suit as the latest attempt to disrupt a settled interpretation of the law.
"Like others who have raised variations on the same arguments," they said, "petitioners do not come close to justifying that destabilizing step."