By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined a chance to reassess the broad legal immunity tech companies have over content hosted on their platforms, turning away on Tuesday an appeal in a lawsuit against Grindr by a male plaintiff who was raped at age 15 by adult men matched to him via the gay dating app.
The justices decided not to hear the plaintiff’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling to dismiss his lawsuit seeking monetary damages against Los Angeles-based Grindr because the company was protected from liability by a provision of federal law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Enacted in 1996, Section 230 allows online platforms, including social media sites and online forums, to host user-generated content without being held legally responsible as the “publisher or speaker” of that content. The provision has shielded online platforms such as TikTok and Meta Platforms from a wide range of litigation.
The plaintiff in the Grindr case has remained anonymous, being referred to as “John Doe” in court filings. His lawyers argued in a court filing that Section 230 has been a “goldmine for amoral companies who need not invest in providing safe products.”
Lawyers for Doe said four adult men raped him on consecutive days in April 2019, when he was a high school student in a small town in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia after he signed up for Grindr and falsely represented he was at least 18 years old. Grindr requires users to be over 18, but does not verify the ages of users.
Three of the men were prosecuted in Canada and received multi-year prison terms, while the fourth remains at large, according to court papers.
The plaintiff filed his civil lawsuit in California state court in Los Angeles in 2023, accusing Grindr of negligence and unlawfully failing to warn users about the risks of child sexual abuse, among other claims, as well as defective app design for matching adults and children for illegal sexual activity. It sought an unspecified amount of compensatory damages for physical and emotional harm, plus punitive damages of at least $66 million.
After the case was moved to federal court, the California-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February that Section 230 barred Doe’s state law claims.
His lawyers in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case called it an optimal vehicle for addressing whether Section 230 “immunizes apps for their own conduct in marketing and designing defective products.”
Proponents of Section 230 have argued that, without it, online services would face potentially crippling legal costs and would be incentivized to censor free expression on the web.
Republican President Donald Trump has been a critic of Section 230 and sought unsuccessfully during his first term in office to end the protections.
The Supreme Court last addressed Section 230 in a set of rulings from 2023. In those cases, the justices declined to chip away at Section 230’s scope and rejected lawsuits that sought to hold tech giants including Alphabet Inc liable for terrorism-promoting content on their platforms.
Online platforms have urged courts not to weaken Section 230’s protections.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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