• by Wendy Davis , July 6, 2026

Tech industry groups are urging an appellate court to leave in place a decision dismissing a lawsuit by parents against Google and TikTok over their alleged failure to remove dangerous material, including "choking challenge" videos that depict people strangling themselves until they pass out.

The parents -- who described themselves as “modern-day champions and vigilantes" -- alleged that they searched for and reported “choking videos and other harmful videos” to YouTube and TikTok, but that their efforts were “unheeded, ignored, and arbitrarily dismissed” by the platforms.

The parents' complaint included claims that Google and TikTok misrepresent that they remove material that violates their content policies, and that the platforms are dangerously defective.

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia DeMarchi in San Jose, California threw out the case last year, ruling that the tech platforms were protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly immunizes tech companies from liability for hosting user-generated content. Section 230 also protects platforms' ability to moderate user-generated content.

DeMarchi's ruling should be upheld, the tech organizations NetChoice and Computer & Communications Industry Association and digital rights watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation argue in a friend-of-the-court brief filed late last week with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"This case lies at the heart of Section 230’s protections," the groups argue, adding that a ruling in favor of the parents "would be profoundly destabilizing," and could ultimately spur social platforms to stop attempting to moderate user-created content.

"No moderation system can satisfy everyone," the groups write. "If every alleged shortcoming in an online service’s reporting and review process may be recast as, say, a product defect, negligence, or misrepresentations whenever a plaintiff believes additional content should have been removed, online services will be deterred from moderating at all."

The organizations are weighing in on a battle dating to 2023, when parents who alleged their children were harmed as a result of material on the platforms, and the Becca Schmill Foundation (created by the family of 18-year-old Rebecca Mann Schmill, who died of a fentanyl overdose after using social media to obtain drugs) sued both tech companies.

DeMarchi said in her ruling dismissing the case that the claims about the platforms' reporting tools actually boiled down to disputes about content.

The parents recently asked the 9th Circuit to revive the case. They argued in papers filed in April that their claims are not about content, but about "defective" reporting tools that "subjected them to friction, confusion, retraumatization, lost time, and futility as they attempted to make the platforms safer for children."

Google and TikTok countered in papers filed last month that claims regarding allegedly defective reporting mechanisms can't be separated from judgments about content.

The claims "are premised on defendants’ alleged failure to perfectly moderate third-party content to plaintiffs’ subjective specifications," the companies argue. "There is only a 'flaw' in defendants’ reporting tools if plaintiffs disagree with defendants’ ultimate decision."

The 9th Circuit hasn't yet set a date for oral arguments.