Ninth Circuit probes Grindr claims of immunity from child rape liability

PASADENA, Calif. (CN) — A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday took up the case of a Canadian man who wants Grindr held liable for matching him on four separate occasions with adult men who raped him when he was just 15 years old.

John Doe, as he’s identified in court filings, asked the appellate court at a hearing in Pasadena, California, to overturn a trial judge’s 2023 dismissal of his lawsuit against the owner of the world’s largest dating app for LGBQT+ individuals.

“This case boils down to duty,” Doe’s attorney Carrie Goldberg told the three-judge panel. “I’m asking the court to hold that the duty Grindr breached arises from its obligations to design reasonably safe products and exercise reasonable care to not increase the risk of child rape.”

The attorney stressed that these duties are separate from Grindr’s status as an online platform where third parties post content such as profiles and messages, which under Section 230 of Communications Decency Act the company is shielded from liability for its users’ posts.

Grindr, according to Goldberg, markets its app on social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram that are widely used by children and it has long known that children who use the app get sexually assaulted. The are have been more than 100 criminal cases related to child rape through Grindr, she said.

Doe was a high school student living in a rural town in Nova Scotia when he downloaded the Grindr app in April 2019 and, when prompted, confirmed that he was 18 or older. The same day he signed up to Grindr he was matched with an adult man who lived near his school and who raped him that afternoon. Over the next three days, he met with three other adult men through the app who also raped him.

When his mother confronted Doe about his whereabouts after his fourth Grindr hookup, he told her that he had met the men through the app and that he had been raped by them. Three of the men have since been sentenced to prison for sex crimes against Doe. The fourth remains at large.

A federal judge in Los Angeles last year dismissed Doe’s lawsuit, agreeing with Grindr that his claims ultimately sought to hold the company liable for failing to regulate third-party content. Since this would treat Grindr as the publisher of its users’ content, the judge ruled, Doe’s claims were barred by Section 230.

“None of our claims have to do with the publication of content,” Goldberg told the appellate panel, likening Doe’s lawsuit to a case brought against Snap Inc. where a different Ninth Circuit panel had found that negligent design claims over a Snapchat feature weren’t barred by Section 230.

The Grindr app defects include a lack of age verification, the use of geolocation to match users to the nearest other user without segregating children from adults, and a failure to warn children that there is a real problem with child rape on the platform, Goldberg argued.

Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, a George W. Bush appointee asked the attorney to provide some specifics of how Grindr should have been designed differently.

In response, Goldberg referred to the consolidated lawsuits against social media apps by states, local governments, school districts and personal injury plaintiffs that seek to hold these companies liable for childhood addiction and the associated mental and physical health problems from these apps.

In those cases, courts have allowed claims to proceed related to the design of the apps even though the extent of the social media companies’ liability would still be limited under Section 230.

Grindr attorney Ambika Kumar told the panel that the company makes serious efforts to stop minors from publishing profiles on the app and exchanging messages with adults.

“No screening method is foolproof,” Kumar said. “Doe found a way around Grindr’s methods. And while what happened to him is wrong, he cannot sue Grindr for failing to monitor for or block his profile, or his messages he exchanged with adults.”

U.S. Circuit Judges Sandra Ikuta, also a George W. Bush appointee, and Bridget Bade, a Donald Trump appointee, rounded out the panel.

In response to questions by Bade, Kumar said that the geolocation function on the app is something that users can turn off and is not unlike similar features on Google maps where someone voluntarily allows the app to use their location.

Asked by Bybee whether, should a simple and effective age verification system be available, Grindr would have an obligation to incorporate it in its app, the company’s attorney said no.

“Any duty that seeks to stop minors from accessing the platform, while perhaps something that Grindr would absolutely adopt if it were easily available, simply boils down to holding Grindr responsible for allowing the minor to go on the platform and publish a profile and exchange messages with adults,” Kumar said — something that would make Grindr responsible for its users’ content and therefore blocked by Section 230.

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