A federal appeals court has revived a key part of a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s X, ruling that the company must face claims it was negligent in its handling of a child exploitation video. While the court upheld the platform’s broad immunity for most user-posted content, it said X cannot hide behind that protection when it fails to act on something it knows about.
The case involves a grim story where two underage boys were blackmailed into providing explicit photos, which were then compiled into a video and posted on Twitter before Musk’s 2022 purchase. According to court documents, after Twitter was alerted to the video, it took the company nine days to take it down and report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In that time, the video was viewed more than 167,000 times.
The court’s decision hinges on a crucial distinction. It ruled that while Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from being sued over what their users post, that immunity doesn’t cover a company’s legal duty to report child pornography once it has “actual knowledge” of it.
The judges dismissed other parts of the lawsuit, including claims that X knowingly benefited from sex trafficking. However, they said the company must also face a claim that its platform made it too difficult for users to report this kind of illegal content. A lawyer for the victims said they now “look forward to discovery and ultimately trial against X to get justice and accountability.”
