• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 27, 2023

Snapchat can't be sued for allegedly designing its service in a way that enabled a teacher to groom, and ultimately sexually abuse, one of her students, a federal appellate court said Monday.

In a three-page opinion, a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a trial judge's determination that Snapchat was immune from liability under Section 230 of the communications Decency Act -- which protects web sites from lawsuits over content posted by users.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought on behalf of a high-school student who was sexually assaulted by his science teacher, Bonnie Guess-Mazock. She allegedly groomed the student by sending him sexually explicit material through Snapchat.

The student sued Snapchat last year for allegedly designing its service negligently, and failing to monitor the platform in a way that would protect minors “from sexual predators who are drawn to the Snapchat application by the privacy assurances granted by the disappearing messages feature of the application.” (The student also sued Guess-Mazock and the school district. )

U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston threw out the student's lawsuit against Snapchat last year, ruling that the company was protected by Section 230.

Rosenthal said that the claims, while fashioned as “negligence” claims, were attempts to hold Snap liable for the messages exchanged between Guess-Mazock and the teen.

The student then appealed to the 5th Circuit, arguing that Section 230 shouldn't protect Snap. Attorneys for the student acknowledged that other courts had ruled in favor of web platforms in prior cases, but argued that those cases were wrongly decided.

“Contrary to the current controlling precedent, Section 230 was not intended to completely insulate powerful social media companies from accountability when they choose to be more than mere conduits of information and instead facilitate exploitation and selectively monitor users’ content for their own profit,” the attorneys wrote.

The 5th Circuit rejected that argument on Monday, calling it “contrary to the law of our circuit.”

Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman noted last year that Snapchat may not have had the legal right to monitor messages that were exchanged between the teacher and student -- in which case Snapchat could only have protected the student by preventing him (and any minor) from having an account.

Snapchat and other major social platforms still face a class-action complaint in California, brought by dozens of parents, teenagers and others who are claiming that social platforms designed their services to be addictive, and then served minors with potentially harmful content that other users had posted.