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The stranger raised his eyebrows and pulled his phone from his back pocket. But Matthew had never met this guy before. The stranger’s tone was friendly and familiar. Matthew had been sitting on the front stoop of his New York City apartment, smoking a cigarette, when a stranger called to him from the sidewalk and started heading up the steps toward him. It all started one evening in late October 2016, right before Halloween. Matthew’s ex-boyfriend, Oscar Juan Carlos Gutierrez, was impersonating him on Grindr and sending men to Matthew’s home to have sex with him. While the goal of most Section 230 cases-and litigations in general-is financial compensation for past injuries, Matthew’s suffering was ongoing. Grindr is a civil lawsuit born from the urgent need for immediate help in a life or death situation.
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In all cases involving a Section 230 immunity defense, there are two stories-the story of the individual and the story of the litigation. Rather, everyone involved in the discussion must look at the stories of real individuals who have been deeply wounded, their lives upended, because of platforms turning a blind eye or willfully ignoring injuries their products facilitate. to rethink liability for third-party platforms, it is important that this conversation not be conducted in fuzzy abstracts.
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As discussion of Section 230 has become more frequent and mainstream in the last several months, with solemn events-like 8chan apparently hosting the suspected murderer’s racist screed in the El Paso shooting and Facebook being painfully slow to remove the live-streamed Christchurch massacre-forcing the U.S. The question is whether the immunity provided to platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has any meaningful limits at all. Last week, Matthew, my co-counsel Tor Ekeland and I petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari in Matthew’s case against Grindr. Editor’s note: This piece is in part a modified excerpt from the author’ s book, “ Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls ,” available from Penguin Random House on August 13, 2019.įor two and a half years, I’ve been fighting for the gay dating app Grindr to bear responsibility for the harms my client Matthew Herrick endured because of its defective product.