On September 23, 2026, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dean Kitchens rejected Roblox's attempt to dismiss the child-safety lawsuit brought by Los Angeles County. Kitchens overruled Roblox's demurrer and denied its anti-SLAPP motion. He found that the county is challenging Roblox's own conduct, including its age-verification and safety systems, and not seeking to hold it liable for what users post. Public nuisance, false advertising and unfair competition claims go forward.
This is a trial-court ruling at the pleading stage, and it decides nothing about whether Roblox is liable. But it is a useful marker of where Section 230 is actually heading. It is not being repealed. It is being read for what it says.
The case for the county
The strongest argument for the county deserves a fair statement. Roblox markets itself to children, and the county alleges that it operates as "a largely unsupervised online world" where adults can easily reach minors and predators can pose as children. If a company tells parents its platform is safe while knowing otherwise, that is a deception claim. Deception is a harm that exists independently of anyone's speech. Roblox disputes the allegations and points to its January 2026 facial age-verification requirement for chat access.
Child sexual exploitation is also among the gravest harms the internet can produce. A reader who wants courts to hear these cases is not asking for anything unreasonable.
What the statute actually says
Section 230(c)(1) provides that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The text is narrow. It bars liability that depends on treating a platform as the publisher of someone else's content. It does not say a platform is immune from every claim that touches its service.
The statute also carves out federal criminal law, including the child-exploitation chapter of Title 18, and, since 2018, certain sex-trafficking claims under 18 U.S.C. § 1591. Congress knew how to write exceptions. It did not write one for a company's own representations about how safe its product is.
The Ninth Circuit made this distinction in Lemmon v. Snap, decided May 4, 2021. That case involved a negligent-design claim over Snapchat's Speed Filter. The court held that the claim treated Snap "as a products manufacturer" and that its duty to design a reasonably safe product was "fully independent of Snap, Inc.'s role in monitoring or publishing third-party content." Kitchens's reasoning applies the same logic to age assurance. A decision about whether and how to verify who is on a platform is a product choice. It is not an editorial decision about any particular post.
Why this is the right line
A pro-innovation, pro-speech position should welcome this result, for three reasons.
- It leaves the speech protection intact. Section 230 exists so that platforms can host user content without being sued over each item. Nothing in the ruling makes Roblox liable for a specific message. The county's theory depends on what Roblox said about its safeguards and what safeguards it built.
- It rewards accurate claims. A company that promises only what it can deliver faces little exposure under a false-advertising theory. The risk falls on firms that overstate their protections, which is a standard consumer-protection rule.
- It avoids the blunt alternative. The other path to child safety is statutory repeal or broad carve-outs, which would push platforms to over-remove lawful speech and to avoid hosting user content at all. Courts policing misrepresentation and design leave the core liability shield in place.
The Supreme Court has so far declined to rewrite the doctrine. In Gonzalez v. Google (May 18, 2023), the Court said it would "decline to address the application of §230 to a complaint that appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief," and sent the case back. The question of how far 230 reaches was left to the lower courts, and judges like Kitchens are now filling the gap one fact pattern at a time.
What to watch
The risks are real, and they are not minor. The ruling carries significant financial exposure. Per the reporting, the county could seek civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation, and a platform with more than 144 million daily users could face a very large count of alleged violations if the theory survives to judgment. That makes the next stages important. Penalty calculations should be proportionate and tied to demonstrated deception or harm, not to a mechanical count of users.
There is also a design-incentive question. If every safety feature becomes evidence in a later lawsuit, firms may stop experimenting with age assurance, or may avoid describing it. Courts should protect companies that make honest, specific, testable safety claims and that improve them over time. Age verification also brings its own privacy costs, because verifying age often means collecting sensitive biometric or identity data. A regime that punishes weak verification and also punishes data collection would put platforms in an impossible position.
Finally, other courts may disagree. Trial-court rulings in California do not bind other jurisdictions, and Roblox can seek appellate review. The durable question is whether appellate courts continue to separate a platform's own conduct from third-party content. If they do, Section 230 keeps its function, and companies are held to what they promise.
The practical lesson for platforms is straightforward. Section 230 protects the decision to host speech. It does not protect the claim that your product is safe for children.