X Must Face Child Sex Abuse Reporting Claims, 9th Circuit Rules

X Corp. must face some revived claims in a lawsuit from victims portrayed in child sexual abuse material who allege the social media platform failed to effectively report the illegal content, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

A unanimous three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit upheld large parts of a lower court’s order finding that X, known as Twitter at the time it was sued, is legally immune under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.

But the opinion, authored by Judge Danielle Forrest, revived the suit’s negligence and defective product claims over X’s failure to promptly report the sexual abuse content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as required by federal law.

Section 230, a sweeping federal law that bars lawsuits against internet platforms over content created by users, doesn’t apply to the lawsuit’s reporting claims because it doesn’t require X to “scour its platform for content triggering its NCMEC-reporting duty.”

“They do not even claim that Twitter must review reported child pornography,” Forrest said. “Rather, they allege that once Twitter has obtained actual knowledge of such content, as evidenced by its representation that it had ‘reviewed the content,’ it had a legal duty to promptly report that content to NCMEC.”

The plaintiffs, a pair of 13 to14 year-old boys at the time of their victimization, said they were deceived by sex traffickers into sending them sexually explicit photos that were then posted on Twitter. The posts received over 160,000 views before the mother of one of the victims contacted an agent at the Department of Homeland Security, who directed Twitter to remove the images.

The victims sued in 2021, alleging that the company reviewed the images depicting the victims but “didn’t find a violation” of its policies and refused to remove the images until the DHS agent intervened.

Judges M. Margaret McKeown and Gabriel P. Sanchez joined the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s opinion.

National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Haba Law Firm PA, and Matiasic Firm PC represent the plaintiffs. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP represents X.

The case is Doe v. Twitter Inc., 9th Cir., No. 24-177, 8/1/25.