Grindr, the dating app that caters to gay men, cannot be held responsible for the rape of a 15-year-old boy who the company matched with sexual predators, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week; it is the latest teens-versus-tech spat in a fight over internet immunity experts say could soon come before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The appellate court’s ruling upheld a 2023 decision by U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II of the Central District of California, who dismissed the suit, saying Grindr was shielded by broad immunity protections passed almost a decade before the plaintiff was born.
In a series of events Wright called “alarming and tragic,” a closeted Nova Scotia teen downloaded the LGBTQ+ hookup app in an attempt to meet other gay kids in his rural Canadian town.
Instead, over the course of four days, he was assaulted by four adult men, including a man who picked him up after the teen sent him pictures from his high school cafeteria.
Three of those men have since been convicted of sex crimes. The fourth remains at large.
In a civil suit first filed in California Superior Court in Los Angeles and later moved to federal court, the boy’s attorneys argued in Doe vs. Grindr that, despite its adults-only terms of service, Grindr knew kids used its app and even marketed to them on TikTok and Instagram. About half of gay teens use Grindr while still underage, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The suit also called the West Hollywood tech firm “a trafficking venture.”
Wright and the 9th Circuit panel both disagreed, saying Grindr was shielded from responsibility for the rapes under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
“This would have been a moment for the 9th Circuit to recognize that a product that recommends children to adults is defective,” said the boy’s attorney Carrie Goldberg. “We have faith the Supreme Court, which has expressed disgust about the overreach of Section 230, will correct course on this disappointing result.”
Section 230 gives broad immunity to internet platforms for what users do there, indemnifying companies such as Google, Meta and ByteDance from most civil claims.
“Section 230 is really the [free] speech engine of the internet — it allows platforms to permit everybody to say what they want to say without a massive liability review,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. “It really does enable free expression.”
But the law was written in 1996 when the web was tied to telephone wires, and location-based social media sex apps were a fever dream of science fiction.
Revising it for the mobile era has largely fallen to the nation’s appeals courts.
“The 9th Circuit has been a leader in interpreting Section 230,” often in ways that favor plaintiffs, Ruane said.
Grindr’s lawyers did not respond to request for comment.
Civil liberties experts were split over whether the decision aligned with the 9th Circuit’s precedent. In 2021, the court ruled Snap could face negligent design claims over in-app filter that encouraged teens to speed. In 2024, it found a third-party developer could be liable for misrepresentation after it failed to unmask anonymous bullies.
Writing for the three-member 9th Circuit panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta said those precedents did not apply to the Grindr case — a decision some experts thought might be reversed by a larger “en banc” panel or possibly proceed to the Supreme Court.
“[The decision] is laughably wrong,” said Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I don’t have enough information to speculate why [the appellate panel] would ignore 9th Circuit precedent, but they certainly did.”
Others disagreed.
“I think that’s extremely in line with its precedents,” Ruane said.
The 9th Circuit currently applies three tests to a case to determine whether Section 230 applies: Is the defendant an internet platform? Does the suit treat that platform as a publisher? And is the harm the act of a third party or inherent to the platform itself?
“Prior to five or six years ago, plaintiffs would bring lawsuits saying this content hurt me,” said Sophia Cope, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties team. “They were so cookie cutter — you’re trying to hold that platform liable.”
More recent suits have instead sought to identify design flaws, perverse incentives and failures to warn to hold apps accountable for a broad range of harms ranging from sex trafficking to speeding deaths to teen suicide.
“They’re framing it as liability for how the platforms are designed,” Cope said. “They’ve been trying to reshape their claims against the platforms for the features the platforms have designed and implemented.”
Attorneys in Doe vs. Grindr argued the app itself is flawed, in part because it has no mechanism to verify that its users are adults.
Such tools exist, and they are used by platforms as diverse as Etsy and the California Employment Development Department. But few social platforms or dating apps use them.
“If you want to filter out the minor users, by necessity you have to age verify everybody,” Cope said. “That implicates the 1st Amendment rights of adults who may not want to have their driver’s license uploaded to this site that relates to gay and bisexual relationships.”
The 9th Circuit has so far tended to agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has blocked rules that would require users to prove their age before opening a social media account.
Still, anger over the law’s limits cuts across partisan lines, and new tests are arising.
A mammoth multidistrict suit against Snap, Meta, ByteDance and Google on behalf of American teens is currently wending its way through the Northern District of California. A similar suit is moving forward in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Even if Doe vs. Grindr ends in the 9th, a new U.S. Supreme Court challenge to Section 230 seems inevitable, experts said.
Whether the justices are eager to hear it is more debated.
“Justice [Clarence] Thomas and at least one or two of the other conservative justices want to take this up again, but I’m not sure there’s a majority,” Cope said.
When the opportunity to further limit internet platforms legal immunity arose in 2023, “the court punted,” she said.
“The court was like, ‘We’re not touching this with a 10-foot pole,’ ” Cope said.
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