Doe v. Discord, Inc.

Issue: Doe v. Discord, Inc.* asks whether 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) immunizes a social media platform from state-law claims arising from the sexual exploitation of a minor user, when the plaintiff frames those claims not merely as failures to moderate content but as independent product-design defects, failure-to-warn violations, and misrepresentations about platform safety. The question is sharpened by the plaintiff's deliberate pleading strategy of recasting monitoring-and-blocking duties under product-liability and tort labels — an approach that has survived § 230 challenges in some courts — and by Discord's specific marketing representations about user safety directed at minors and their families.

This is a Memorandum of Opinion and Order issued by Judge Nugent of the Northern District of Ohio following full briefing and oral argument on Discord's motion to dismiss and Doe's motion to transfer venue. The court first denied transfer, finding that key witnesses and evidence were located in Ohio and that sending the case to the Northern District of California would merely place it alongside, not within, the Roblox MDL. On the motion to dismiss, the court applied the Sixth Circuit's three-part § 230 immunity test from *Jones v. Dirty World Entertainment Recordings* and held that all eight remaining state-law claims were barred because each, regardless of label, targeted Discord's publisher-function conduct — specifically, its decisions about monitoring, screening, and filtering third-party messages. The court rejected the design-defect theory as a repackaged moderation claim, refused to extend the *Barnes v. Yahoo!* promissory-estoppel exception to aspirational safety marketing, and declined to consider more specific misrepresentation allegations raised for the first time at oral argument, relying on *Bates v. Green Farms Condo Ass'n*. The case was dismissed with prejudice, the court finding any amendment futile.

This ruling reinforces § 230's breadth in the Sixth Circuit by applying the *Jones* framework with particular rigor to a child-safety fact pattern, directly rejecting the product-liability recharacterization strategy that plaintiffs in platform-harm litigation have increasingly deployed to escape immunity. The decision supplies the Northern District of Ohio's most detailed analysis of the *Barnes* promissory-estoppel exception, drawing an explicit line between aspirational corporate safety messaging — which cannot anchor a surviving misrepresentation claim — and specific, individualized promises that could. It also creates a meaningful doctrinal gap with the Ninth Circuit's *Lemmon v. Snap* line, which permits negligent-design claims to proceed when a platform feature is treated as the defendant's own expressive conduct rather than third-party content moderation, a tension the Sixth Circuit has not yet resolved. The with-prejudice dismissal signals that courts applying *Jones* are unlikely to permit iterative re-pleading aimed at constructing a § 230-surviving theory after the gravamen of the complaint targets moderation.