CA courts rule Musk’s X must face previously dismissed child exploitation lawsuit

Part of a previously dismissed lawsuit charging Elon Musk’s X platform with becoming a safe haven for child exploitation will proceed, a San Francisco court ruled on Friday.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, must face the negligence claim, even though the company’s alleged action took place well before Musk bought X in October 2022.

According to the complaint, “argued and submitted on February 5th, 2025,” the original 13-count case had been initially dismissed by a trial judge in December 2023.

The appeals court on Friday reversed part of that decision.

Dani Pinter, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation attorney representing the unnamed plaintiffs, said in a statement: "We look forward to discovery and ultimately trial against X to get justice and accountability."

Lawsuit revived

The appeal case – titled “John Doe 1; John Doe 2 v Twitter, Inc.; X Corp – accuses Twitter of “slow-walking” its response to reports about the explicit content posted of two minors, and “not immediately taking it off the platform.”

The filing also claims Twitter failed to promptly report the video to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

The case itself revolves around a sex trafficker who coerced two underage boys, the Plaintiffs, into producing pornographic content that the trafficker then posted on Twitter.

The predator, posing as a 16-year-old girl, had approached a 13-year-old boy and his classmate on the messaging platform Snapchat, which the victims then used to send nude images to the predator.

The trafficker used those images to blackmail the Plaintiffs into producing additional pornographic images, which were later compiled and posted on Twitter without their knowledge, until the video was circulated at their school.

That’s when the victim’s families filed their first report wth Twitter in an attempt to get the video taken down, but days later, were instead informed that Twitter had “reviewed the posts, found no policy violations, and would take no further action.”

“Plaintiffs allege that Twitter both underutilizes the tools it has developed to curb the spread of this illegal content and has passed on opportunities to develop better tools, despite the inadequacy of its existing infrastructure,” the case states.

Negligent reporting infrastructure

Over the course of nine days, until the Department of Homeland Security got involved and forced the platform to remove the images, the posts received over 150,000 views and 2,000 retweets.

At the heart of the matter is whether “an interactive computer service provider could be held liable for hosting the illegal content.”

Part of the court’s 22-page opinion summary explained that the previous 2023 ruling that Twitter would be immune from the publisher liability claim would stand, essentially refuting the idea that it “knowingly benefitted from a sex-trafficking venture” and purposefully created search features that "amplify" child pornography posts.

However, the court did rule that the company could be held liable for its “defective reporting-infrastructure design,” which has nothing to do with Twitter’s role as publisher.

Musk has not publically commented on the three-judge panel's decision as of Friday.

"The facts alleged here, coupled with the statutory 'actual knowledge' requirement, separate the duty to report child pornography to NCMEC from Twitter's role as a publisher," the three-judge panel wrote.

X will also face a claim that its infrastructure made it too complicated to report child exploitation. In 2024, the NCMEC said it had received more than 456,000 reports of online enticement targeting minors, almost double the number of CyberTipline reports received in 2023, the NCMEC website states.