A Removal Gambit That Backfired
On September 23, 2025, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued Snap Inc. in Washington County District Court, alleging the company violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act by marketing Snapchat as safe for children — using "12+" and "T for Teen" app-store ratings — while the app exposed minors to "profanity, sex content, nudity, and more," and by designing addictive features like Snapstreaks and infinite scroll without disclosing their effects.
Snap removed the case to federal court under 28 U.S.C. § 1442, the federal officer removal statute, arguing its cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security's Know2Protect online-safety campaign and the FDA's The Real Cost anti-vaping campaign meant it was "acting under" federal officers. On August 27, 2026, Judge Daniel D. Crabtree of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas rejected that theory and remanded the case to state court, finding the ad partnerships reflected "no more than a standard arms-length commercial transaction" rather than a federal officer's "strict guidance or control" — the showing required under the three-part test (acting under federal direction, a causal nexus to the claims, and a colorable federal defense) (Technology & Marketing Law Blog).
The Steelman: States Have a Legitimate Interest
Kobach's underlying claims sit on solid doctrinal ground. Policing deceptive marketing to parents — misrepresenting an app's safety rating while its design is engineered for compulsive teen use — is a traditional exercise of state consumer-protection power, not an attempt to dictate what speech Snapchat carries. Parents rely on app-store age ratings as a proxy for safety; if those ratings are knowingly false, that is a garden-variety deception claim, the kind states have brought against advertisers for decades. Kansas isn't alone: Kobach has said other states have pursued similar theories against Snap, part of a broader wave of AG suits over platform design and youth mental health.
The State-Actor Trap Snap Built for Itself
The removal fight, though, is where this case gets interesting for Section 230 watchers. To keep the case in a friendlier federal forum, Snap argued its safety-campaign partnerships with DHS and FDA made it enough of a government instrumentality to invoke a doctrine written for wartime contractors and other entities executing sovereign functions under federal direction. As Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog observed, that argument — even having failed — creates a template for a very different kind of plaintiff: one arguing that Snap's government ties make it a state actor, subject to First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment constraints when it moderates content, rather than a private company exercising editorial discretion.
"No doubt, Snap performed some services for federal officers" — but not enough to satisfy the removal statute, the court held.
That distinction matters enormously, because state-actor status runs in the opposite direction from where platforms want to be. In Moody v. NetChoice, decided July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court affirmed that platforms are protected by the First Amendment when they exercise "editorial" discretion — deciding what third-party content to carry, promote, or remove (Supreme Court opinion, 22-277). That protection, layered on top of Section 230(c)(1)'s bar on treating platforms as the "publisher or speaker" of others' content and 230(c)(2)'s good-faith moderation shield (47 U.S.C. § 230), exists precisely because platforms are private actors. Strip that away by recasting Snap as a government instrumentality, and moderation decisions that were constitutionally protected editorial choices become potential due-process and viewpoint-discrimination violations.
Not the Only Crack This Year
This remand lands amid a broader erosion of Section 230's procedural shield in 2026. In California v. Meta, decided August 18, the Ninth Circuit held that a district court's denial of Section 230 immunity is not immediately appealable — meaning platforms must survive discovery and summary judgment before they can invoke the defense at all, a reversal EFF warned turns 230 from "immunity from suit" into mere "immunity from ultimate liability" (EFF). Neither ruling touches the statute's text, but together they show courts narrowing 230's practical value through procedure and doctrine rather than legislation.
Our View
Kansas's consumer-protection claims deserve a hearing on the merits, in the state court where they were properly filed — that's a fight about marketing and design, not speech. But Snap's litigation strategy here is a cautionary tale for the industry: trading a short-term forum advantage for a legal theory that, if it gains traction, could help plaintiffs argue platforms forfeit their First Amendment editorial protections by cooperating with federal safety campaigns. That outcome would be far worse for Snap — and for every platform that partners with DHS or FDA on public-service messaging — than losing a removal motion. It would also perversely discourage exactly the public-private cooperation on youth safety that regulators say they want. The better lesson from Kansas v. Snap isn't that Section 230 is collapsing; it's that companies should stop reaching for jurisdictional tricks that put their core constitutional protections at risk.