Stebbins v. Rumble Inc.
Issue
In *Stebbins v. Rumble Inc.*, plaintiff David Stebbins argues that a statement Rumble made in a related miscellaneous proceeding — acknowledging an editorial decision to permit anonymous posting — constitutes newly discovered evidence sufficient under FRCP 60(b)(2) to reopen the court's prior dismissal of Rumble as a defendant. The non-obvious dimension is whether a platform's litigation statement made to *resist* a third-party subpoena on First Amendment grounds can be repurposed as an affirmative admission of tortious editorial control, and whether such an admission could itself defeat § 230 immunity by recharacterizing a general anonymity policy as the platform's "own conduct" causally contributing to the alleged harm.
What Happened
Stebbins, proceeding pro se, filed this motion at an early interlocutory stage after the court sua sponte dismissed Rumble Inc. as a defendant and ordered transfer of the case. The motion asks the court to vacate that dismissal and reinstate Rumble, relying primarily on ECF 31 from a related miscellaneous proceeding (1:24-mc-00478-MN) in which Rumble invoked the First Amendment to resist disclosure of a user's identity. Stebbins characterizes that statement as a post-dismissal admission that Rumble made an affirmative editorial choice to enable anonymous posting — a choice he argues foreseeably emboldened the anonymous Doe defendant to post the statements at issue. He further contends that reinstating Rumble as a Delaware-domiciled defendant would eliminate the jurisdictional gap underlying the transfer order, rendering that order moot. The motion also asserts that it falls within FRCP 60(c)(1)'s one-year window, though the filing contains an internal date inconsistency that may complicate that showing.
Why It Matters
This motion illustrates a strategy plaintiffs have repeatedly attempted with limited success: taking a platform's statement made in an unrelated legal context to protect its users and repackaging it as a confession of liability. The legal obstacle is twofold — courts have consistently treated decisions about anonymous posting as quintessential editorial functions protected by § 230, and statements made to assert a procedural or constitutional right are not equivalent to admissions of underlying tortious conduct. The motion also tests the outer boundary of the "platform's own conduct" exception established in cases like *Roommates.com*: whether a documented platform policy enabling anonymity could ever constitute material contribution to the *unlawfulness* of specific content, rather than merely to its delivery — a question that remains theoretically open but has yet to find a receptive court on analogous facts. More broadly, the filing is a useful marker of how the procedural vehicle of FRCP 60(b) is being used in pro se platform-liability litigation to challenge interlocutory § 230 dismissals, a recurring posture that existing doctrinal commentary has not yet systematically addressed.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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