In re: Roblox Corporation Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation

JOINT CASE MANAGEMENT STATEMENT filed by All Plaintiffs.…

Issue: In *In re: Roblox Corporation Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation*, Plaintiffs argue that Roblox defendants should be compelled to produce state-investigation materials at the outset of MDL discovery, and that anticipated objections grounded in the Communications Decency Act should not be permitted to delay that production. The question is whether legal frameworks developed in social-media-addiction litigation — where § 230 defenses turned on algorithmic design rather than criminal facilitation — can be carried intact into a child sexual exploitation case where FOSTA-SESTA, not the general § 230 immunity, is the operative statutory provision.

Plaintiffs filed this Joint Case Management Statement in the early consolidation phase of the Roblox MDL in the Northern District of California, attaching as Exhibit A a December 2022 discovery order from *In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation* before Judge Gonzalez Rogers. The filing uses that prior order as a blueprint, urging the Roblox court to adopt a parallel early-production framework requiring defendants to turn over materials already provided to state investigators. Plaintiffs also invoke the Social Media MDL's content/product distinction — which treated platform architecture and algorithmic design as product-liability issues outside § 230's reach — to preemptively foreclose CDA-based discovery objections from Roblox. The relief sought is inferred rather than explicitly stated in the available text, but amounts to an early discovery order modeled on the Social Media MDL framework, governed by a negotiated protective order.

Roblox is among the largest platforms used by minors, and this MDL will test whether legal theories forged in social-media-addiction cases can survive transplantation into the more demanding context of child sexual exploitation, where FOSTA-SESTA imposes a knowledge-and-benefit standard that operates independently of and in addition to any product-design theory. The discovery fight being constructed here functions as a proxy for the broader merits battle: if Plaintiffs succeed in compelling early production of state-investigation materials before Roblox can litigate its § 230 defenses, they will have established a procedural posture that significantly advantages the litigation going forward. If the court adopts Plaintiffs' framework, it will implicitly answer — at least at the discovery stage — whether FOSTA-SESTA's exception forecloses § 230-based objections from the case's outset, a ruling that could be cited across other CSEA platform litigations nationwide.

Issue: Whether §230 of the Communications Decency Act bars early discovery production of materials previously produced to state investigators in a products liability MDL alleging that social media platforms used algorithms to addict adolescents.

In this early discovery order in the Social Media Adolescent Addiction MDL (not the Roblox litigation itself), the court ordered Meta and TikTok/ByteDance to produce narrow sets of documents already provided to state investigators, selecting 25 of 357 Meta requests and 7 of 279 TikTok requests focused on platform design, youth engagement, and defendants' knowledge of adolescent harms. Defendants invoked the CDA to resist even this initial production, but the court rejected that argument, reasoning that the scope of the CDA was then pending before the Supreme Court and that genuine disputes existed about how the platforms functioned relative to the asserted claims. The court framed the litigation as concerning algorithmic design and addiction rather than third-party content, explicitly reserving any determination of the CDA's applicability to the underlying claims.

The order signals that courts may decline to allow §230 to function as a shield against early discovery in algorithmic-harm litigation, particularly where the claims are framed as product design liability rather than publisher liability for third-party content — a framing with direct relevance to the Roblox proceeding in which this document was filed as an exhibit.

Issue: Whether §230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes Roblox, Discord, Snap, and Meta from tort liability arising from third-party predators' use of their platforms to groom and sexually exploit minor users, and whether the First Amendment independently bars such claims by treating the platforms' content moderation and editorial decisions as protected expressive conduct.

Defendants Roblox, Discord, Snap, and Meta filed a Consolidated Case Management Statement in this MDL proceeding consolidating numerous actions alleging that minor plaintiffs were groomed and sexually exploited by predators who used defendants' platforms to initiate contact before moving communications to other services or arranging in-person assaults. Defendants identified several threshold legal issues requiring resolution before discovery, including motions to compel arbitration (with sub-questions about applicability of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act), Section 230 immunity, and First Amendment protection for editorial and content-moderation decisions. Defendants argued that all claims are barred by §230(c)(1) because they necessarily implicate defendants' roles as publishers of third-party content, citing *Doe v. Grindr*, *Doe v. MySpace*, and related circuit precedents, and separately argued that the First Amendment, under *Moody v. NetChoice* and *Miami Herald v. Tornillo*, precludes liability for platforms' filtering, prioritization, and content-moderation choices. Defendants further contended that plaintiffs' claims independently fail on elements of proximate causation, duty, fraud specificity, and because online services are not "products" subject to product liability law.

This MDL consolidates a large volume of child sexual exploitation claims against major platforms and will require the court to rule on the outer boundaries of §230 immunity and First Amendment protection for content moderation in the context of minor-safety harms—an area where circuit courts have generally upheld immunity but public and legislative pressure to narrow it is intense. The court's resolution of whether algorithmic and editorial decisions by platforms constitute protected expression under *Moody*, and whether §230 bars claims framed as product liability or negligent design rather than publisher liability, could significantly shape the litigation landscape for platform child-safety suits nationwide.

Issue: Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes Roblox Corporation from civil liability for product design features alleged to have facilitated child sexual exploitation and assault by third-party users on its platform.

Reply Brief — Attachment 140

Issue: In *In re Roblox Corporation Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation*, Plaintiff Jaimee Seitz argues that her claims — arising from her child's fatal self-harm following grooming on Roblox and Discord — share sufficient common questions of fact with MDL No. 3166 to warrant transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1407, even though the MDL was constituted around sexual exploitation and assault rather than coerced self-harm. The question is whether platform-level design defects and child-safety failures can serve as the unifying factual predicate for consolidation when the downstream harms across the MDL docket differ categorically in type.

This is a reply brief filed before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation by Plaintiff Jaimee Seitz, submitted in support of her motion for partial transfer of her case into MDL No. 3166 (*In re Roblox*) and MDL No. 3047 (*In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction*). Seitz contends that the predatory grooming pipeline — targeting, isolation, and platform migration from Roblox to Discord — is structurally identical whether it ends in sexual exploitation or coerced self-harm, and therefore generates overlapping discovery into the same internal documents, custodians, and platform-design decisions. She disputes Defendants' characterization of her claims as categorically distinct "violent/extremist content" cases, arguing that the MDL's organizing principle is Roblox's platform identity and safety-design failures, not the specific harm that grooming ultimately produces. In support, she points to a parallel MDL case, *Doe v. Roblox Corp.*, in which a victim was groomed on Roblox, migrated to Discord, and coerced into both sexual conduct and self-harm — framing Seitz as a factual neighbor within the existing docket rather than an outlier. She asks the Panel to sever her case, transfer her Roblox and Discord claims into MDL No. 3166, and transfer her TikTok and ByteDance claims into MDL No. 3047.

This filing tests whether the JPML will treat a platform's alleged safety-design failures as an outcome-agnostic consolidation anchor — a theory that, if accepted, could draw a broader category of technology-facilitated child harm cases into MDL proceedings that were constituted around sexual exploitation specifically. The brief's most contested move is its dismissal of Section 230 differentiation: the FOSTA-SESTA carve-out from § 230 immunity is available to most MDL No. 3166 plaintiffs but categorically inapplicable to Seitz, meaning the § 230 pretrial framework already developed in the MDL may not translate cleanly to her claims. If the Panel credits Defendants' taxonomy — distinguishing sexual exploitation from violent or extremist content facilitation — it could signal a meaningful limit on how broadly platform-identity can unify factually adjacent but legally divergent cases within a single MDL proceeding.