Snapchat.

A federal court has found that the Communications Decency Act protects Snap Inc. from how users deploy the app's Speed Filter, at a time when calls to roll back Section 230 of the law are growing louder.

U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the Central District of California ruled Tuesday that the Speed Filter, Snapchat's built-in speedometer, is not content created by the company. Instead, the court agreed with Snap's Munger, Tolles & Olson attorneys that the feature is a content-neutral tool, and can be used for "proper and improper purposes," preserving the publisher immunity included in Section 230.

"While a user might use the Speed Filter to Snap a high number, the selection of this content (or number) appears to be entirely left to the user, and based on the warnings, capturing the speed while driving is in fact discouraged by Defendant," Fitzgerald wrote in the ruling.

Wisconsin parents Carly Lemmon and Michael Morby and Samantha and Marlo Brown brought the case last May on behalf of their sons, 17-year-old Hunter Morby and 20-year-old Landen Brown. Their sons died in a car crash after capturing a "Snap" clocking them at 123 mph on the Speed Filter. The crash also killed the driver, 17-year-old Jason Davis.

The order, filed Tuesday, contradicts a 2018 ruling from the Georgia Court of Appeals, which allowed a negligence case to proceed against the company over the feature. Since plaintiffs never uploaded a Snapchat post, the California court ruled that the case did not involve any third-party content uploaded in the incident and, therefore, the Communications Decency Act, known as the CDA, did not apply.

Unlike the Georgia case, Fitzgerald had to defer to precedent set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on how the CDA applies to neutral tools. Last year, the Ninth Circuit dismissed Dyroff v. Ultimate Software Grp. because the recommendations and notifications at issue in the case "were content-neutral tools used to facilitate communications."

The judge pushed back against plaintiffs' arguments that the CDA does not apply because they are not asking the court to hold Snap liable for any user content.

"The Court cannot ignore the fact that the content itself, the 100-MPH-Snap (or other high-speed Snaps) is at the crux of Plaintiffs' claims," he wrote. "In other words, despite Plaintiffs' assertions to the contrary, it appears that Plaintiffs are seeking to hold Defendant responsible for failing to regulate what the users post through the Speed Filter; if the users were not motivated to capture their high speeds for content, they would not speed."

Munger Tolles' Jonathan Blavin, Rosemarie Ring and John Major counseled Snap in the case. A representative said the firm is unable to comment on the case.

The parents were represented by Daniel Ethan Selarz of Selarz Law in Los Angeles; Michael Neff and Darryl Dwayne Adams of The Law Office of Michael L. Neff in Atlanta; Naveen Ramachandrappa of Bondurant Mixson & Elmore in Atlanta; and Thomas Dempsey of the Law Offices of Thomas M. Dempsey in Beverly Hills.

In an email statement, plaintiffs counsel said the CDA does not exist to protect Snapchat in this case. "Snapchat, not any of its users, created the dangerous Speed Filter product. When a Georgia trial judge, in another near-fatal incident involving Snapchat, made the same ruling …  reversed the trial court and held that the CDA plainly does not apply," they said.

The plaintiffs counsel said they feel strongly that the Ninth Circuit will view the facts and law in the case similarly to the Georgia Court of Appeals.

The ruling comes at a time when Section 230 has once again come under fire, as politicians seek to hold Big Tech accountable. In order to prevent child exploitation, a draft bill from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, would require websites to follow guidelines outlined by a commission in order to hold on to their Section 230 immunity. And at a public meeting last week on the future of the provision, Reuters reported that U.S. Attorney General William Barr said, "Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230's broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form."