The Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal seeking to hold Reddit responsible for child pornography on its site.
In a brief, unsigned order, the justices on Monday rejected a request from a group of unnamed victims and their parents to reverse a lower ruling that favored the forum website.
Internet companies enjoy wide legal protections for third-party content under a controversial shield known as Section 230, which has remained largely unchanged since it was passed in 1996.
The Supreme Court earlier this month resolved a challenge to the scope of Section 230 on narrow grounds, leaving the question of how far its protections stretch unresolved.
The Reddit case involved a carveout to those protections that lawmakers passed in 2018, and the court’s order allows the justices to again steer clear of Section 230.
The parents and victims sued Reddit by citing the carveout, which made it easier to take legal action against websites for enabling sex trafficking. It allows plaintiffs to bring civil sex-trafficking claims against internet companies if the “conduct underlying” such a claim would amount to the federal sex-trafficking crime.
At issue was who must commit the underlying conduct: only the website itself, or whether it also extended to third parties. The lower court adopted the narrower version, leading the plaintiffs to appeal to the justices.
“Website defendants are using this narrow construction to eliminate victims’ claims at the pleading stage and short-stop any discovery into their knowledge, benefit, and participation in sex-trafficking ventures,” they wrote to the justices.
The victims and their parents argued that liability should extend to Reddit and other internet companies that “knowingly benefit” “from participation in a venture” with a third party who committed the sex-trafficking crime.
But the court rejected their request to take up the case.
Reddit had asked the high court to stay away and let the lower ruling stand.
“The Court should deny the petition because the decision of the Ninth Circuit, the first and only court of appeals to address the question presented, does not conflict with any decision of this Court or any other circuit,” Reddit wrote in court filings. “This case is also a poor vehicle to resolve the question presented because petitioners have not alleged sex trafficking as required by the statute they invoke.”
The Supreme Court earlier this month resolved a challenge to the breadth of Section 230’s protections on narrow grounds, leaving the question unresolved.