Child Porn Victims’ Case Against Reddit Declined by High Court

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a case brought by the victims of child pornography who claim that the social discussion forum Reddit Inc. hosted and benefited from sex trafficking.

Reddit, one of the most visited websites in the world, had succeeded in arguing that it had legal immunity from the victims’ lawsuit under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 internet law that is facing enormous political scrutiny and was already the subject of a different case before the Supreme Court.

The justices’ denial of review comes after it passed on addressing the scope of the liability shield earlier this month in a case alleging that Google LLC’s YouTube aided the Islamic State by recommending its videos. In Gonzalez v. Google LLC, the court kept intact Section 230 and instead resolved the case under traditional liability principles.

In October 2022, a three-judge panel for the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit ruled that Reddit was protected by Section 230, which shields platforms from lawsuits over content posted by users, despite a 2018 carve-out to the law for sex trafficking suits.

The plaintiffs, six minors and their parents who remained anonymous in the case, claimed in their class action that Reddit over the past decade ignored requests to remove child sexual abuse material posted on discussion threads known as subreddits, while profiting from advertisements featured on those threads.

The lawsuit relied on an amendment to Section 230 known as the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which was supposed to help victims of trafficking bring civil lawsuits against online platforms that helped the traffickers. But Ninth Circuit Judge Milan Smith wrote in the opinion that the law “retains only a limited capacity” to grant relief to victims.

The statute’s complicated wording indicated that the plaintiffs, who were only bringing a civil lawsuit, needed to show that Reddit violated criminal law by actively participating in a sex trafficking venture, which the plaintiffs couldn’t, the appeals court said.

The victims argued in their petition that letting the Ninth Circuit’s ruling stand denies them remedies against “the actors who have the most to gain from the proliferation of online child sex trafficking.”

Susman Godfrey LLP represents the victims. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP represents Reddit.

The case is Jane Does v. Reddit Inc., U.S., No. 22-695, cert petition denied 5/30/23.