Amicus Curiae Brief — John Doe, et al., Petitioners v. X Corp., fka Twitter, Inc.

No. 25-949

IN THE

Supreme Court

of the United States

___________

JOHN DOE, ET AL.,

Petitioners,

v.

X CORP., FKA TWITTER, INC.,

Respondent.

_________________________________

On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States

Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

_________________________________

BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE TIM TEBOW

FOUNDATION AND CHILD PROTECTION

ORGANIZATIONS IN SUPPORT OF

PETITIONERS

_________________________________

SAMUEL J. SALARIO, JR.

Counsel of Record

LAWSON HUCK GONZALEZ

1700 South MacDill Ave.

Suite 240

Tampa, FL 33629

(813) 765-5113

samuel@lawsonhuckgonzalez.com

JASON GONZALEZ

ANTHONY J. SIRVEN

BRIAN M. TRUJILLO

LAWSON HUCK GONZALEZ

101 East College Ave.

Floor No. 5

Tallahassee, FL 32301

Attorneys for Amici Curiae

March 12, 2026

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES...................................... iii

INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE ................................ 1

Tim Tebow Foundation ......................................... 1

Child Protection Amici.......................................... 3

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT ............................ 4

ARGUMENT ............................................................... 7

I.

The testimonies of CSAM victims demonstrate

the harms flowing from an active, online CSAM

marketplace........................................................... 7

Jane Doe 1 — Forced to leave home to escape

fear of recognition from re-circulating CSAM ..... 8

Jane Doe 2 — Her CSAM is still on Twitter........ 9

Jane Doe 3 — Ongoing trade of her CSAM

impacts her relationship with her husband

and children ........................................................ 10

Jane Doe 4 — Her CSAM is found through

any searches of her legal name .......................... 11

II. The Ninth Circuit continues to confuse and,

dangerously, misread an important federal

question; the Petition should be granted to

restore Section 230 to its text ............................. 13

ii

A. First, social-media platforms routinely

take inconsistent legal positions as to

when the content they reproduce belongs

to them .......................................................... 14

B. Second, FOSTA was meant to curtail

abuse of Section 230 immunity, but given

the lower courts’ infidelity to the text,

it accomplished nothing ............................... 16

i.

Congress creates the FOSTA Exception.... 17

ii. Twitter’s conduct below, as alleged,

satisfied the exception ........................... 18

III. A broad view of Section 230 is not necessary

to the survival of these platforms ....................... 21

CONCLUSION .......................................................... 24

APPENDIX — Child Protection Amici Curiae ........ 1a

iii

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

Cases

Page

Doe Through Roe v. Snap, Inc.,

144 S. Ct. 2493 (2024) ....................... 13, 20, 21, 22

Doe v. Facebook, Inc.,

142 S. Ct. 1087 (2022) ....................................14-15

Doe v. Grindr Inc.,

128 F.4th 1148 (9th Cir. 2025) ........................... 18

Does 1-6 v. Reddit, Inc.,

51 F.4th 1137 (9th Cir. 2022) ............................. 18

Fair Hous. Council of San Fernando Valley v.

Roommates.Com, LLC,

521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008) ....................... 21, 22

Malwarebytes, Inc. v. Enigma Software Grp. USA, LLC,

141 S. Ct. 13 (2020) ....................................... 16, 17

Moody v. NetChoice, LLC,

603 U.S. 707 (2024) ....................................... 14, 22

Paroline v. United States,

572 U.S. 434 (2014) ....................................... 12, 19

United States v. Reingold,

731 F.3d 204 (2d Cir. 2013) ................................ 19

Constitutional Provisions

U.S. Const. amend. I ................................................. 14

Statutes and Other Authorities

18 U.S.C. § 1591 ........................................ 5, 18, 19, 24

18 U.S.C. § 1591(a) .............................................. 18, 19

iv

18 U.S.C. § 1591(e)(4) ...................................... 7, 15, 19

47 U.S.C. § 230 ......................... 5, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,

20, 21, 22, 23, 24

47 U.S.C. § 230(c) ........................................ 5, 6, 15, 16

47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(2)(A) ....................................... 15, 18

47 U.S.C. § 230(e) ...................................................... 18

47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(5).................................................. 16

47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(5)(A) ............................................. 18

S. Ct. R. 10(c) ............................................................. 13

S. Ct. R. 37.2 ................................................................ 1

Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex

Trafficking Act of 2017, Pub. L. No. 115-164,

132 Stat. 1253 (2018) .......................................... 17

Our Story, The Phoenix 11,

(last visited Feb. 24, 2026).................................... 9

Production and Active Trading of Child Sexual

Exploitation Images Depicting Identified Victims

(Mar. 2018) ............................................................ 7

A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The

Interpretation of Legal Texts 56 (2012) ............. 16

United States Department of Justice, Project Safe

Childhood, Child Sexual Abuse Material. 2023

Subject Matter Expert Working Group Report.

N.p., 2023. Web. .................................................... 7

UNODC Call to Action, The Phoenix 11,

(last visited Feb. 26, 2026) ..................................... 9

1

INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE 1

Tim Tebow Foundation

Tim Tebow Foundation (“TTF”) is a nonprofit

organization founded in 2010 by Tim Tebow to bring

Faith, Hope, and Love to those needing a brighter day

in their darkest hour of need.

TTF’s four focus areas are children with profound

medical needs, people with special needs, orphan care

and adoption, and anti-human trafficking and child

exploitation. TTF has been called and humbled to

serve the most vulnerable people across 120

countries.

TTF takes a strategic approach to serving

vulnerable people by forging partnerships with law

enforcement,

non-governmental

organizations,

governments, and faith-based organizations around

the world. TTF’s fight against child exploitation and

child sexual abuse material led it to convene a

strategic meeting in Lyon, France where it brought

together the world’s leading experts in victim

identification to answer two questions: (1) how many

children seen in abuse images are still waiting to be

identified and safeguarded; and (2) how can they be

found and protected?

Currently there are over 52.5 million child sexual

abuse files in the Homeland Security Investigations

child-sexual-abuse-image

database

and

approximately 89,000 unidentified series of images of

1 No counsel for any party authored this brief in whole or in part,

and no entity or person, aside from amici curiae and its counsel,

made any monetary contribution toward the preparation or

submission of this brief. Counsel of record for all parties have

received the timely notice required under Rule 37.2.

2

children being sexually abused and exploited that

reside in the world’s combined global database, the

International Child Sexual Exploitation database at

INTERPOL. As a result of the meeting in Lyon,

Operation Renewed Hope III was born, the first-ever

US based global operation to find these children in the

images and bring them to safety. To date over 1,119

children have been identified from their abuse images

through Operation Renewed Hope III and over 550

have been protected. Due to the scale of this crisis,

TTF’s Chairman, Tim Tebow, and Vice President of

Anti-Human Trafficking & Child Exploitation,

Camille Cooper, testified before Congress exposing

the number of children that were waiting to be

protected for the first time.

TTF submits this brief because the scale of harm

and the number of children being sexually abused

online and offline—whose images circulate without

end—is a global crisis.

Child abuse offenders are insatiable in their desire

for new and increasingly violent abuse, the trade of

this Child Sexual Abuse Material (“CSAM”) thus fuels

a global demand for new images, that can only be met

with the abuse of new victims. TTF recognizes that

central to the eradication of this evil is requiring that

technology companies remove these images from their

platforms and cease support of this trade—an ability

they have but refuse to execute.

By

immunizing

social-media

platforms’

participation in the CSAM trade—even after those

platforms have identified and acknowledged

possession of the CSAM and refused to remove it (just

as Twitter did here)—the decision below protects their

active creation and maintenance of a market for the

3

CSAM that TTF and its law-enforcement partners

seek to eradicate.

TTF therefore has a compelling interest in ensuring

that the Section 230 immunity is restored to what its

text requires: immunity for efforts to protect children,

not immunity for efforts to harm them.

Child Protection Amici

The Child Protection Amici listed in the Appendix

are nonprofit organizations, professional institutions,

and individual practitioners engaged in the fight

against child sexual exploitation.

Their involvement spans from building the

technologies law enforcement uses to detect offenders

and rescue children from abuse to building

technologies used to detect and remove CSAM

globally at scale to coordinating the multidisciplinary

response to child abuse through Children’s Advocacy

Centers nationwide to representing survivors of child

sexual abuse material crimes in restitution

proceedings and civil actions.

Each has a direct stake in ensuring that the law

permits accountability for platforms that actively

participate in the maintenance and protection of the

infrastructure used in CSAM trade. And each joins

TTF in respectfully urging the Court to grant the

Petition.

4

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

Before Twitter came to be recognized as “X” it was

readily identified by its pioneering use of the

“hashtag” or “#” to thread conversations, connect

people, and create communities around shared

interests. The hashtag was widely popular. And it was

widely effective. So effective that if Twitter wanted to

shut down entire nodes of online traffic, it need only

block usage of the hashtag. With that, the

“community” splinters; their ability to organize

around a topic slows and they’ll need to rebuild, if they

can. Twitter’s done this before.

Twitter blocked “#SaveTheChildren” when it

believed that the tag was hijacked by QAnon to spread

misinformation about child-sex-trafficking rings.

Finding these conspiracy theories harmful to the

public, Twitter shut down the traffic. Misinformation,

Twitter’s thinking went, had no home on its popular

social-media platform.

But there’s a problem.

Though misinformation is intolerable, child sexual

exploitation, to Twitter’s mind, is tolerable—more

than that, it’s profitable.

Unlike #SaveTheChildren, Twitter doesn’t shut

down hashtags which have as their object the

commercial trade of Child Sexual Abuse Material

(“CSAM”)—i.e., images and videos of children being

sexually abused, drugged, harmed, and permanently

traumatized. Entire communities on Twitter use

known hashtags (e.g., “#megalinks” or “#c*p,” for

“child porn”) to request certain kinds of CSAM (like

preferred age ranges, say, “11–15”), offer variations of

it, trade it, sell it, and offer free links for free samples.

5

This is a literal, sustained open-air market created by

and supported through Twitter infrastructure.

The decision below holds that neither citizen nor

government can avail themselves of the American

judicial system to stop this trade. The decision below

means that not a single child depicted in these images

has the right to come to court to compel the removal of

those images. All this, the Ninth Circuit holds, is what

the law demands under 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)—the

Section 230 immunity.

The opposite is true.

Far from immunizing a social-media platform’s

participation in CSAM trade, Section 230(c)

immunizes efforts to stop that trade and protect

children. The words of Section 230(c) command this.

It’s even in the title: “Protection for ‘Good Samaritan’

Blocking and Screening of Offensive Material.” The

decision below got it backwards. It immunized

Twitter’s decision to identify, possess, and then

reproduce John Doe 1 and John Doe 2’s CSAM—their

cries for help notwithstanding.

The Ninth Circuit also held that the carveout to

Section 230 immunity for active participation in child

sexual exploitation under 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (the

“FOSTA Exception”) didn’t apply. But it does.

In support of the Petition, Amici bring to the

attention of the Court three considerations not already

raised in the Petition.

First, the testimonies from CSAM victims and

research presented, infra § I, show that: (1) CSAM

victims are harmed not just when the material is

created and first produced, but with each

republication of the material; and (2) because the

6

CSAM trade is insatiable in its perverse pursuits, it

insists on the creation of more obscene material and

new victims.

Second, the Ninth Circuit misapplied the FOSTA

Exception because it missed that Twitter knowingly

benefits from child sexual exploitation by actively

creating, maintaining, and protecting the CSAM

trade channels necessary to the marketing,

commercialization, and exchange of CSAM, including

support for the ancillary “community” which purports

to normalize and encourage this trade.

Third, it is no response to say that the technology

needed for the widespread removal and prevention of

CSAM on Twitter, and other platforms, is not

available or too burdensome to use. It has long been

here.

***

At the center of this dispute is whether Twitter can,

with impunity, participate in the proliferation of

material that codifies forever the worst moment in so

many children’s lives. The Ninth Circuit has said

Twitter can proceed with impunity.

This Court should grant the Petition and lay a

tombstone on decades of infidelity to the words of

Section 230(c) and revert it to its natural meaning:

Social-media companies are immunized when they

protect children, not when they participate in the

harm to children.

7

ARGUMENT

I.

The testimonies of CSAM victims

demonstrate the harms flowing from an

active, online CSAM marketplace.

Absent from the Ninth Circuit’s Section 230

jurisprudence is how social-media platforms directly

and “knowingly assist[], support[], or facilit[ate], 18

U.S.C. § 1591(e)(4), child sexual exploitation by:

(1) protecting the poisonous fruit of child sexual

exploitation (the CSAM) from civil judgments

compelling their removal—preserving for the CSAM

creators not just the memorialization of the initial

harm to the victims (the thing they derive pleasure

from), but also their merchandise, the thing they sell

and trade for money;

(2) feeding the insatiable demand and reward

system that necessarily creates new victims; 2 and

See United States. Department of Justice, Project Safe

Childhood, Child Sexual Abuse Material. 2023 Subject Matter

Expert Working Group Report. N.p., 2023. Web., available at

bit.ly/4aGrFRb, at 1 (“The market for CSAM among

individuals with a sexual interest in children drives the

demand for new and more egregious images and videos.

The push for new CSAM results in the continued abuse and

exploitation of child victims, and the abuse of new

children every day. When these images and videos are posted

and disseminated online, the victimization continues in

perpetuity. Children often suffer a lifetime of re-victimization

knowing the documentation of their sexual abuse is on the

internet, available for others to access forever.” (emphasis

added)); see also Production and Active Trading of Child Sexual

Exploitation Images Depicting Identified Victims (Mar. 2018),

available at bit.ly/4rIjV7t (same).

2

8

(3) supporting an artificial “community” of abusers

who need to trade these images to normalize their

deviance. 3

The following testimonies 4 demonstrate the harms

to CSAM survivors long after their initial torture has

ended. Powerless to stop this trade, these survivors

are all revictimized with the recirculation and

immortalization of their abuse. They live with the fear

that, at any moment, at any place, someone near to

them has seen (or will see) their images or videos.

Jane Doe 1 — Forced to leave home to escape

fear of recognition from re-circulating CSAM

Jane Doe 1 survived childhood sexual abuse and

was among the few who would get an opportunity to

testify against their abusers. And though the trial

marked the end of a season for those abusers, it would

mark the beginning of a new season of harm flowing

to her.

Unable to remove her CSAM from online trade, new

harms encumbered Jane Doe 1. Fear of recognition

and embarrassment plagued her. To soften these

harms, she relocated far from her home state to a

place where the internet isn’t really “a thing like it

was where [she] lived.”

3 See supra note 2 at 5 (“This stable, reliable access to CSAM

online normalizes deviant behavior and offenders’ perception of

the sexual abuse of children and the production, advertisement,

possession, and distribution of CSAM.”); see also id. at 6

(contrasting the prevalence of “thriving” online communities “for

these like-minded offenders to . . . normalize their behavior, and

encourage each other” against the pre-internet world where they

would be forced to meet “in person”).

4 Un-anonymized copies on file with the authors.

9

The downloads had left her in a state of near-total

isolation—hiding in her house for days and terrified

to meet new people. She withdrew to a rural life and

avoided people.

There, Jane Doe 1 has built a protective “cocoon”

with her significant other and church community. At

times, however, she is reminded that “all of those who

inflict pain on children are out in the world and

[continue] download[ing] pictures of [her] and other

children being hurt,” she remains offline for fear of

“being found.”

She emphasizes that “everyone who downloads [her]

CSAM still hurts [her] and still makes [her] afraid to

go out in the wider world.”

Jane Doe 2 — Her CSAM is still on Twitter

Jane Doe 2 emphasizes the role that Twitter played

in her own life. She stresses that because her CSAM

continues trading on Twitter, she is “revictimized

every single time” those images are “viewed,

downloaded, or sent to another person” because while

the “pain of [her] sexual abuse may have ended a long

time ago, [] the sexual objectification of [her] as a child

. . . never will.” Even now that the physical abuse has

ended, “peace and safety,” she says, “especially

online,” will never come.

She knows that Twitter is “enabling online

perpetrators to continue sexually exploiting” her.

Worse, she’s blighted by the thought that each

instance of her CSAM being traded is an instance of

“[t]he sexual harm [she] endured as a child” being

celebrated “as entertainment” for the benefit of

Twitter and its users.

10

Jane Doe 3 — Ongoing trade of her

CSAM impacts her relationship with her

husband and children

Jane Doe 3’s father sexually abused her, recorded

the abuse, and circulated the images and videos

online. “It blows my mind,” she stresses, “that it’s still

going around after all these years. Technology has

changed. I am now an adult and it happened to me

when I was so little. I was a child. And people are still

watching it.”

She’s resigned to “accept[ing]” that her CSAM “will

always be circulating.”

Given her father’s actions, she never entrusts her

children to the care of another because of what her

“dad did to [her] and [her] friends.” Intimacy in her

marriage suffers because she “know[s] people are still

looking at what happened to” her so she

“disconnect[s].” She attributes her continued “online

exploitation” to her “whole life” being “a mess” and

feelings of being “worthless” and “not good enough.”

The only thing she could do, for her peace, was to

opt out of services that would notify her of her CSAM

being reshared. She “did not want to be notified every

single time someone in the world accessed” the CSAM

even though she “knew people were looking at it,” she

simply “didn’t want to know every time it happened.”

Powerless to remove these images from circulation,

she asks only for the recognition that even though this

“happened to [her] as a child, that [] doesn’t continue

to prevent [her] from being a good mother and a

worthwhile person as an adult.”

“I,” she concludes, “am a person who deserves

respect.”

11

Jane Doe 4 — Her CSAM is found through any

searches of her legal name

Searching Jane Doe 4’s legal name online doesn’t

return a list of her academic successes or community

participation. Instead, it brings up the exploitive

images she was coerced into producing—CSAM her

parents have tried to remove, after having to sift

through hordes of images of other children being

abused, without any meaningful success.

And should they prevail on removing a single image,

it resurfaces “under a different account in a matter of

minutes.” But even success there means little given

the “hundreds of other images” of their daughter

which remain on the same platforms. “I can get on any

popular platform today,” her mother explains, “type in

my daughter's name, and within seconds have access

to sexually graphic imagery of her.”

Worse, predators don’t just actively trade her CSAM

on social-media platforms, they pose as her. They

coerce others into trading similar images under the

pretense that she is freely making these images as a

child. Jane Doe 4’s mother has received panicked calls

from people in the community who have discovered

these falsified profiles to warn her that Jane Doe 4 is

engaged in pornographic content. Boys her age have

chastised her, in person, for “selling porn videos” and

admonished her that “there were much better ways to

make money.”

Those predators have even reproduced her

baptismal video in CSAM groups and linked it to the

rest of her CSAM, drawing horrifying comments. Her

parents constantly field calls from people they know,

sincerely concerned about what they see. But they

12

also receive calls from predators “asking about our

daughter.”

Though Jane Doe 4 is now in college and has

distanced herself from any social-media presence, her

images remain online. So her parents remain in the

fight. “Imagine that,” her parents say about their

monitoring efforts, “having to watch your own child

being forced to do extremely graphic sexual acts, to

view their young body being exposed for the world to

see. It is nothing less than horrific.”

***

The Court described the injury flowing to CSAM

victims as follows:

The demand for child pornography harms

children in part because it drives production,

which involves child abuse. The harms caused

by child pornography, however, are still more

extensive because child pornography is “a

permanent record” of the depicted child’s abuse,

and “the harm to the child is exacerbated by

[its] circulation[.]” . . .

These crimes were compounded by the

distribution of images of her abuser’s horrific

acts, which meant the wrongs inflicted upon

her were in effect repeated; for she knew her

humiliation and hurt were and would be

renewed into the future as an ever-increasing

number of wrongdoers witnessed the crimes

committed against her.

Paroline v. United States, 572 U.S. 434, 439–41

(2014).

The Ninth Circuit’s reasoning—by protecting the reobjectification of CSAM victims—reduces the

13

survivors to commodities. To things to be pushed and

pulled through the internet for the benefit of others.

Should the Ninth Circuit’s read of Section 230

survive, the CSAM victims are again relegated to the

subjugation of another. They are, again, placed

beyond the protection of the law and told that the law

cannot prevent their harms—past, present, or future.

As discussed next, however, Section 230’s text

commands the opposite.

II.

The Ninth Circuit continues to confuse

and, dangerously, misread an important

federal question; the Petition should be

granted to restore Section 230 to its text.

For nearly six years, Justice Thomas has been

sounding the alarm of what’s to come should socialmedia platforms continue with impunity. It was only

two years ago that he, along with Justice Gorsuch,

dissented from the Court’s denial of certiorari in Doe

Through Roe v. Snap, Inc., 144 S. Ct. 2493 (2024). In

their view, that petition presented the Court with an

opportunity to address the mess that had become of

Section 230’s immunity. They emphasized that the

petition “presented the Court with an opportunity to

do what it could not” do in prior Section 230 petitions:

“squarely address § 230’s scope.” Id. at 2494.

Challenging the denial, they said that though “the

Court denie[d] certiorari today,” there “will be other

opportunities in the future.” Ibid.

That time has come.

Section 230’s scope, especially as to its immunity

carveout related to child sexual exploitation, is an

important federal question “that has not been, but

should be, settled by this Court.” S. Ct. R. 10(c).

14

As the Petition points out, the decision below is

wrong as a matter of law. The decision promulgates

the decades-long trajectory of: i) extending the limited

immunities that do exist in Section 230 to

unimaginable lengths; ii) creating new immunities

unmoored from the text of Section 230; and, worst of

all, iii) nullifying the exceptions to immunity which

were designed to protect children, resulting in more

harm to children.

Amici write separately to add two overlays not in

the Petition, highlighting the Ninth Circuit’s error.

A. First,

social-media

platforms

routinely take inconsistent legal

positions as to when the content they

reproduce belongs to them.

As Justices Thomas and Gorsuch admonished:

“Social-media platforms have increasingly used § 230

as a get-out-of-jail free card” and have taken

contradictory positions as to who the speaker is. In

cases implicating the platforms’ First Amendment

rights, they claim “that users’ content is their own

First Amendment speech,” to be left alone from

government regulation, because they “organize users’

content into newsfeeds or other compilations[.]” Ibid.

(citing Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024)).

“When it comes time for platforms to be held

accountable for their websites, however, they argue

the opposite.” Ibid.

Just as Twitter below, the “[p]latforms claim that

since they are not speakers under § 230, they cannot

be subject to any suit implicating users’ content, even

if the suit revolves around the platform’s alleged

misconduct.” Ibid. (citing Doe v. Facebook, Inc., 142 S.

15

Ct. 1087 (2022) (Thomas, J., respecting the denial of

certiorari (emphasis in original))).

Should the decision below stand, and as discussed

next, that “misconduct” includes “knowingly

assisting, supporting, or facilitating” known child

sexual exploitation and trafficking efforts. See

18 U.S.C. § 1591(e)(4).

All this against the backdrop that Section 230,

undisputedly, would have immunized Twitter had it

removed the CSAM. That’s the very purpose of the

immunity: shielding those platforms with stiffer

spines from liability should they filter out illegal

content, like CSAM. 5 The title of Section 230 is

“Protection for private blocking and screening of

offensive material.” And the title of Section 230(c) is

“Protection for ‘Good Samaritan’ Blocking and

Screening of Offensive Material.” Accordingly, should

an internet platform identify material which, for

example, constitutes CSAM, they can remove that

material with impunity.

What was meant to be a shield for the protection of

children is thus now a shield for the infrastructure

that perpetuates harm to children. Indeed, the very

possession and trade of CSAM on these platforms—

but nowhere else in American life—is shielded from

review. Neither citizen nor government, the lower

courts say, can enter the well of the courtroom to

demand that images be removed and their traders

held to account.

See 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(2)(A) (creating the immunity for

platforms who “voluntarily” take action “in good faith to restrict

access to or availability of material that the provider or user

consider to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy . . . .”)

5

16

All this even though no harm would come to those

platforms should they remove the material on a

proper read of Section 230(c). At bottom, we’re left

with the realization that platforms, like Twitter, do

not want to remove this material, it’s not profitable.

So Congress responded—or at least it tried to—with

the FOSTA Exception. The decision below misses how

Twitter’s efforts to sustain the CSAM trade with its

infrastructure would have satisfied the exception, we

take that next.

B. Second, FOSTA was meant to curtail

abuse of Section 230 immunity, but

given the lower courts’ infidelity to

the text, it accomplished nothing.

The words of Section 230, like all legal texts, “are

of paramount concern, what they convey, in their

context, is what the text means.” A. Scalia & B.

Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal

Texts 56 (2012). The Ninth Circuit missed that the

FOSTA Exception in Section 230(e)(5) applied here,

not just for the reasons identified in the Petition for

Twitter’s refusal to monitor and filter CSAM

activity, see Pet. at 30–40, but also for Twitter’s

active participation in supporting, maintaining,

and facilitating that trade on its online

infrastructure.

As Justice Thomas warned in a different opinion,

“[e]xtending § 230 immunity beyond the natural

reading of the text can have,” and has already had,

“serious consequences.” Malwarebytes, Inc. v. Enigma

Software Grp. USA, LLC, 141 S. Ct. 13, 18 (2020)

(Thomas, J., respecting the denial of certiorari).

“Before giving companies immunity from civil claims

for knowingly hosting illegal child pornography . . . we

17

should be certain that is what the law demands.” Ibid.

(cleaned up).

That law, Congress has said, “demands” the

opposite.

i. Congress creates the FOSTA

Exception

In April 2018, Congress passed the Allow States

and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act,

“FOSTA,” and it had a single object: amending

Section 230 to expressly carve out immunity for

participation in, and benefiting from, sexual

exploitation schemes.

FOSTA “amend[ed] the Communications Act of

1934 to clarify that section 230 of such Act does not

prohibit the enforcement against providers and users

of interactive computer services of Federal and State

criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation

of children or sex trafficking[.]” Allow States and

Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017,

Pub. L. No. 115-164, 132 Stat. 1253 (2018).

Congress clarified that Section 230 “was never

intended to provide legal protection to websites that

unlawfully promote and facilitate . . . traffickers in

advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex

trafficking victims[.]” Id. § 2(1). FOSTA was

implemented into Section 230 by adding what is now

Section 230(e), and called the “FOSTA Exception” to

Section 230 immunity.

It begins with “[n]othing in [Section 230] (other than

subsection (c)(2)(A)) shall be construed to impair or

limit — (A) any claim in a civil action brought under

section 1595 of title 18, United States Code, if the

18

conduct underlying the claim constitutes a violation of

section 1591 of that title[.]” 47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(5)(A).

The conduct at issue here constituted a violation of

Section 1591.

ii. Twitter’s conduct below, as

alleged, satisfied the exception

As relevant here, 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a) criminalizes

“knowingly” “benefit[ting], financially or by receiving

anything of value, from participation in a venture

which has engaged in” an act which “recruits, entices,

harbors, transports, provides, obtains, advertises,

maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a

person . . . knowing . . . that the person has not

attained the age of 18 years and will be caused to

engage in a commercial sex act[.]”

There’s no dispute that Twitter held in its hands

material it knew was CSAM. See Pet. App. 11a (the

Ninth Circuit acknowledged this fact). Where the

dispute lies is in the Ninth Circuit’s reliance on its

prior decisions to hold that “Twitter’s failure to

respond to demands to remove the videos is not the

type of ‘affirmative conduct’ that constitutes

‘assistance, support, or facilitation’ of sex trafficking

for which § 1591 attaches criminal (and,

correspondingly, civil) liability.” Pet. App. 11a–12a

(quoting Does 1-6 v. Reddit, Inc., 51 F.4th 1137, 1145

(9th Cir. 2022)).

Taking it even further, the Court also said “Twitter

did not ‘actually engage[ ] in some aspect of the sex

trafficking,’ as a legal matter, by failing to remove

known [CSAM] from its platform.” Id. at 12a (quoting

Doe v. Grindr Inc., 128 F.4th 1148, 1155 (9th Cir.

2025)).

19

Though the Petition explains well the problems of

this logic and that the Ninth Circuit did not “read the

complaint as a whole,” Pet. at 30–33, there’s another

reason Section 1591 precludes immunity for Twitter:

its support of the trade by supporting and protecting

the necessary trade infrastructure.

In this way, Twitter benefits from its knowing

“assist[ance], support[], or facilita[tion],” 18 U.S.C. §

1591(e)(4), of the CSAM abusers’ child sexual

exploitation which causes children to engage “in []

commercial sex act[s],” 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a).

Those producing the CSAM need to trade that

material to not just profit and derive their own

perverse pleasures, but also to “normalize” their

actions. Just like in any other market, they need to

trade CSAM and participate in “communities” which

affirm their conduct. And just like in any other

market, they need to innovate and produce new

content. Cf. Paroline, 572 U.S. at 439–40 (recognizing

that “[t]he demand for child pornography . . . drives

production”).

But with each transaction or engagement, flowing

from that commercial activity, Twitter benefits. Ads

are viewed, engagement increases, subscriptions and

premium tiers are sold, all while the platform’s library

of CSAM increases, along with its trade.

Indeed, the ease with which CSAM can now be

downloaded creates “an expanding market for child

pornography [that] fuels greater demand for perverse

sexual depictions of children, making it more difficult

for authorities to prevent their sexual exploitation

and abuse.” United States v. Reingold, 731 F.3d 204,

217 (2d Cir. 2013) (collecting cases).

20

No matter how many times the child is harmed and

re-harmed—industry roars on. None of this is in the

Ninth Circuit’s opinion. But it was in the First

Amended Complaint. See Pet. App. 174a–75a

(alleging how Twitter’s hash system sustains

community pages dedicated to the selling, trading,

and creation of new CSAM under tags like

“#megalinks” and, more brazenly, “c*p” to identify

“child porn,” and “#s2r” for “send to receive”). This

mechanism of trade is buttressed by Twitter and the

system it maintains.

So blatant is this Twitter-specific CSAM trade that

people publicize their “requests” for specific CSAM.

See id. at 176a (compiling real Tweets requesting

particular CSAM such as “black girls 13–17,” “12–15,”

and, because some material is paid-only content,

“Free links ? #megalinks #mega #dropboxtrade”).

Contrary to the Ninth Circuit’s review, the First

Amended Complaint didn’t just allege “filtering” or

“monitoring” problems, it alleged direct, affirmative

conduct in that Twitter “has created the meeting place

and the marketplace for a community that is

generating content which Twitter is monetizing at the

expense of exploited children.” Ibid. That is knowing,

active participation in the trade which causes children

to be sexually exploited—and it satisfies the FOSTA

Exception allowing civil remedies against Twitter.

***

The result then is that by perpetuating infidelity to

the text of Section 230, we are today exactly where

Justice Thomas and Gorsuch warned we would be:

“Notwithstanding the statute’s narrow focus, lower

courts have interpreted § 230 to confer sweeping

immunity for a platform’s own actions.” Snap, 144

21

S. Ct. at 2493–94 (Thomas, J., joined by Gorsuch, J.,

dissenting from the denial of certiorari (cleaned up)).

“Even when platforms have allegedly engaged in

egregious, intentional acts—such as “deliberately

structur[ing]” a website “to facilitate illegal human

trafficking”—platforms have successfully wielded

§ 230 as a shield against suit.” Ibid.

Absent a correction in Section 230’s trajectory, the

harms to CSAM victims will persist. All this despite

the fact that the founts of that harm—the socialmedia platforms—can (with the proper immunity)

slow, if not altogether end, the proliferation of those

harms. But they don’t.

The implication of the decision below is that even if

Twitter never removed the Petitioners’ CSAM, they

could never, through court action, force Twitter to do

so. The Petitioners, however, benefitted from DHS

intervention in their dispute with Twitter to remove

the material. But the majority of CSAM victims have

not had, do not have, and will not have the same

access to extra-judicial remedy. For those survivors,

the worst moments of their lives are preserved in

perpetuity. Should the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning

prevail, that CSAM will be traded and re-traded

without any mechanism for intervention.

This Court should thus reorient lower courts

towards fealty to the words of Section 230, which

immunize the protection of children, not the harm of

children.

III.

A broad view of Section 230 is not

necessary to the survival of these

platforms.

In response to the dissenting opinion in Fair Hous.

Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.Com,

22

LLC, accusing the majority of not going far enough in

its extension of Section 230 immunity, the majority

(correctly) responded that “the Internet” is no longer

a “fragile new means of communication that could be

easily smothered in the cradle by” regulatory

safeguards. 521 F.3d 1157, 1175 n.39 (9th Cir. 2008).

Indeed, it “has outgrown its swaddling clothes and no

longer needs to be so gently coddled[.]” Id. at 1175

n.39.

And though Roommates.com was ultimately an

unfortunate step towards the confused precedent that

led to the decision below, see Pet. App. at 10a (citing

Roommates.com for the proposition that “any activity

that can be boiled down to deciding whether to exclude

material that third parties seek to post online is

perforce immune under section 230”), its proclamation

about the development of the internet in 2008 is all

the more true in 2026.

What were once fledgling startups have now come

to dominate American life. See Moody, 603 U.S. at 716

(“Social-media platforms, as well as other websites,

have gone from unheard-of to inescapable.”). It’s no

response, therefore, to say that should these

companies be held to account for their role in the

dissemination of CSAM, the world would suffer.

Further still, the technology necessary to prevent

these problems altogether already exists. For one

thing, Twitter can immediately shut down usage of

the hashtags helping offenders coalesce around

CSAM. For another, PhotoDNA—a perceptual

hashing technology developed in 2009 by Professor

Hany Farid of the University of California, Berkeley,

working with Microsoft Research—has long been

available to effectively screen for CSAM. PhotoDNA

generates a digital “fingerprint” of an image that

23

stays reliable even when the image is resized,

cropped, compressed, recolored, or otherwise

altered—the tactics offenders use to evade detection.

Because it works at the time of upload, the tool scales

effortlessly across billions of files.

Those platforms which have integrated PhotoDNA

into their upload and messaging flows have seen

sharp drops in the recirculation of known CSAM. No

company, therefore, can seriously claim it cannot

easily screen for CSAM when the solution is this

accessible.

Another tool, Project Arachnid, run by the Canadian

Centre for Child Protection, crawls the open and dark

web, compares images against known CSAM hashes,

and sends removal notices to hosting providers. As of

February 2026, the project had processed more than

176 billion images, flagged over 126 million suspect

files for analyst review, and issued more than 141

million takedown notices.

Most Americans are familiar with automated

filtering software on social-media platforms. They’ve

seen these companies deploy similar technologies not

for the protection of children but for ideological

reasons. Anyone on social media has seen filtering

efforts around the COVID pandemic, election

interference, health claims, wars in foreign places,

and so on.

The CSAM problem is not a technological one, it’s a

business one. It reduces to whether Twitter, and its

peers, will deploy the existing technology for the

benefit of children. The misapplication of Section 230

has emboldened these companies to referee political

discourse but not the abuse of children.

24

Reforming the immunity to align it with its original

intent—as measured by the words of Sections 230 &

1591—removes

protection

for

the

knowing

participation in the CSAM trade. Twitter and its peers

would have clear incentives to use the tools they

already possess to stop the revictimization of

survivors while preventing the creation of new

victims.

Though the solution has been present, the urgency

to deploy it has not. The Petition presents the Court

an opportunity to address this while restoring Section

230 immunity to what its words require.

CONCLUSION

Amici ask the Court to grant the Petition to restore

Section 230 to its original purpose.

Respectfully submitted,

SAMUEL J. SALARIO, JR.

JASON GONZALEZ

Counsel of Record

ANTHONY J. SIRVEN

LAWSON HUCK GONZALEZ

BRIAN M. TRUJILLO

1700 South MacDill Ave.

LAWSON HUCK

Suite 240

GONZALEZ

Tampa, FL 33629

101 East College Ave.

(813) 765-5113

Floor No. 5

samuel@lawsonhuckgonzalez.com Tallahassee, FL 32301

Attorneys for Amici Curiae

March 12, 2026

APPENDIX

i

APPENDIX — Child Protection Amici Curiae ........ 1a

1a

Child Protection Amici Curiae

Canadian Centre for Child Protection Inc.

Carol L. Hepburn

Child Rescue Coalition

National Children’s Alliance

National Criminal Justice Training Center of

Fox Valley Technical College

Rights4Girls