Does 1–6 v. Reddit: Ninth Circuit upholds Section 230 in CSAM suit

In Does 1–6 v. Reddit, Inc., six plaintiffs who said they were victims of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) brought suit against Reddit, alleging that users had posted and recirculated illegal images of them when they were minors and that Reddit had been slow to remove the material. The plaintiffs invoked the carve-out to Section 230 created by FOSTA — the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act — which permits certain civil claims under federal sex-trafficking law (18 U.S.C. §§ 1591 and 1595) to proceed despite the platform immunity that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act otherwise provides.

Section 230 generally shields online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. FOSTA, enacted in 2018, narrowed that immunity for claims related to sex trafficking. The central legal question in the case was how broad the FOSTA exception is: whether a platform loses immunity merely because trafficking material appears on it and the platform benefits financially in a general sense, or only where the platform itself knowingly participated in or assisted the trafficking venture.

The district court for the Central District of California dismissed the claims, and the plaintiffs appealed. On 24 October 2022 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (No. 21-56293) affirmed the dismissal. The court read the FOSTA exception narrowly, holding that to overcome Section 230 a plaintiff must allege that the platform's own conduct amounted to knowing participation in a sex-trafficking venture under the relevant statutes, not merely that user-generated trafficking content existed on the site and that the platform derived generalised revenue. Because the plaintiffs had not adequately alleged Reddit's own knowing involvement, the FOSTA carve-out did not apply and Section 230 barred the claims.

The decision was the first appellate ruling to address the scope of the FOSTA exception in this way, and it became an important precedent. For plaintiffs, it set a demanding standard for using FOSTA to pierce platform immunity; for platforms, it preserved Section 230 protection in cases where the alleged wrong is the presence of users' illegal content rather than the platform's own knowing participation.

For an archive of Reddit controversies, the case is significant both legally and thematically. It documents named victims attempting to hold Reddit accountable for CSAM hosted in its communities, and it illustrates the continuing tension between platform-liability immunity and child-safety harms. It should be described accurately as a ruling in Reddit's favour on the legal question of immunity — the court did not find that the underlying material was lawful or that the plaintiffs were not harmed, but rather that the specific statutory exception did not allow the suit to proceed against Reddit on the facts alleged.