The Supreme Court of Texas today denied petitions by Facebook Inc. to stay trial court proceedings in related Houston cases that involve claims from three sex trafficking victims who were contacted and exploited by traffickers through Facebook or Instagram.
In one case, a teenage girl was lured to a fake modeling audition and assaulted by two men. In another case, a girl agreed to meet a man who had contacted her on Facebook and ended up raped and forcibly prostituted.
The lawsuits in Texas’ Harris County allege that Facebook is aware that sex trafficking takes places on its platform, including the victimization of minors, yet it does little to nothing to stop this from happening.
Lawyers representing Facebook have sought to avoid trial in the 334th District Court, where Judge Steven Kirkland denied motions to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claims without trial.
The Silicon Valley company claims “immunity for claims arising out of content generated by third parties,” citing 47 U.S.C. § 230, a federal law dating to the 1990s that tech companies have long relied on to protect themselves from suit.
That law, referred to commonly as Section 230, says that internet companies are not to be treated “as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content provider [i.e., a user].” It says, “No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”
In light of this, many courts have interpreted Section 230 as giving internet service providers and platforms like Facebook broad immunity from suit for claims relating to the actions of their users, including in cases of defamation and other torts.
In other words, Facebook is just an intermediary and isn’t to be held responsible for anything that its users do, no matter how reprehensible.
But Annie McAdams, a personal-injury lawyer representing three sex trafficking victims in Houston, is trying to upend that. “Nothing in the language, context, or history of Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act indicates a congressional intent to preempt [my clients’] claims,” she says in a court filing.
McAdams and other lawyers for the victims acknowledge that they are arguing in the face of a substantial body of caselaw in Facebook’s favor: “Many courts attributed Congress with a paradoxical intent of providing seemingly unlimited immunity to internet companies, even when they knowingly facilitated the endangerment and exploitation of children.”
“Congress unequivocally corrected (the courts’) misunderstanding in 2018 through FOSTA [the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act], the express purpose of which was ‘to clarify that section 230 . . . does not prohibit the enforcement against [internet companies] of [laws] relating to the sexual exploitation of children or sex trafficking,’” McAdams wrote to the appellate court.
Following today’s decision by the Texas Supreme Court, Facebook will have to face trial in Houston over claims that the company’s platform facilitated the trafficking of three victims, identified only as “Jane Doe,” who were contacted through Facebook or Instagram before being raped, abducted, and trafficked. The victims were teenagers at the time.
The lawsuits say that Facebook is not doing enough to address trafficking risks on its platform, saying it could provide basic warnings, implement safeguards to prevent adults from connecting with minors they do not know, or verifying the identity and age of users and prevent unauthorized adults from contacting minors.
