Fair Hous. Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC
Issue
Whether Roommates.com was immune under § 230 for designing a mandatory registration process that required users to disclose and filter by sex, sexual orientation, and familial status — characteristics protected under the Fair Housing Act.
What Happened
Roommates.com operated a website designed to match people seeking roommates with people renting out spare rooms. At the time of the district court's disposition, the site had approximately 150,000 active listings and received around one million page views a day. Before subscribers could search listings or post housing opportunities, they were required to create a profile by answering a series of questions. Beyond basic identifying information, the site required each subscriber to disclose their sex, sexual orientation, and whether they would bring children to the household — and then required them to specify their preferences as to those same characteristics in a prospective roommate. Users chose from preset drop-down options. The site also included an open-ended "Additional Comments" field for users to describe themselves and their preferences freely. The Fair Housing Councils of San Fernando Valley and San Diego sued, alleging that the mandatory questionnaire and the profile-matching system it generated violated the Fair Housing Act and California housing discrimination law. The en banc Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Kozinski, held that § 230 did not protect Roommates.com with respect to the mandatory discriminatory questionnaire and the roommate-preference profiles it generated. The website materially contributed to the development of the unlawful content by requiring users to make and express discriminatory housing preferences as a condition of using the site. However, the court held that § 230 did protect the "Additional Comments" field, where users could type anything freely — because Roommates.com neither elicited nor shaped the content of those freeform responses.
Why It Matters
The leading Ninth Circuit decision defining when a platform becomes a "co-developer" of user content and loses § 230 immunity. Established the "material contribution" test: a platform loses immunity when it materially contributes to the unlawful character of content by structuring how content is created and eliciting the illegal elements. Roommates.com distinguished Carafano's broad immunity rule and articulated the outer boundary of § 230 — a platform that designs its product to generate unlawful content is not a passive host but an active content developer.
Related Filings
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