AUSTIN – Today, the Texas Supreme Court permitted lawsuits accusing Facebook of permitting sex traffickers to prey on children to proceed.
Last April, the 14th Court of Appeals determined Facebook had not established that it is entitled to mandamus relief in lawsuits seeking to hold the social media giant liable for damages resulting from being victims of sex trafficking.
The plaintiffs claim social media giants like Facebook have treated children as a commodity, providing predators unrestricted means to prey on victims.
Court records show Facebook moved to dismiss all claims against it as barred by section
230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, arguing that the plaintiffs’ claims are “inconsistent with” section 230(c)(1), which says that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
The Texas Supreme Court allowed the plaintiffs’ statutory human-trafficking claims to proceed, but dismissed their common-law claims for negligence, gross negligence, negligent undertaking, and products liability.
“We do not understand section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking,” the opinion states. “Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that section 230 does not allow it. Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing.
“This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”
Case No. 20-0434