In some ways, it’s surprising the controversy didn’t come sooner.

Snapchat, an app that many young people use to send risqué pictures to one another, is facing allegations it has “engaged in an insidious pattern and practice of intentionally exposing minors to harmful, offensive, prurient, and sexually offensive content.”

Yet the charge, levied by celebrity L.A. attorney Mark Geragos on behalf of an unnamed 14-year-old boy as a proxy for a host of others, is not expected to bring significant change to the way the $18 billion Venice social media and messaging company does business.

Geragos’ claims, outlined in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, rely on provisions of the Communications Decency Act that require websites to notify parents of minors using their platform about the possibility that explicit content could be found and that third-party filter software be made available. It is a provision that has been largely ignored by websites, app developers, and the legal system.

“It hasn’t been taking up much of any of the online child safety debate in recent decades,” said Emma Llanso, director of the Free Expression Project at Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., who added that she expects most of the case to be dismissed on First Amendment grounds.

If not, Snapchat, which boasted in March that some 23 million of its daily active users were between the ages of 13 and 18, would not be alone in facing potentially penalties that could run to $50,000 a violation.

“If the court decides that this is a hook for civil liability, then I would guess there are a lot of people liable,” Llanso said.

That prospect means the company might prefer to settle out of court, said Dov Fischer, an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School of downtown Los Angeles.

“I would think that one day (the notifications provision) might be struck down, but this would not be the case,” he said, noting that Snapchat might prefer to settle the case out of court. “It just strikes me as the kind of case where Geragos would like to make some good money for him and his clients.”

Court fight

For his part, Geragos said he welcomes a court fight.

“I’m not Snapchat. I don’t know what their strategy is,” he said. “We’ve filed the lawsuit and we are proceeding as if we are going to court.”

While other social media apps promised to store user videos, images, and messages forever, Snapchat built its reputation after launching in 2012 by making the opposite claim, pledging to users that their photos would disappear from the platform after being viewed by the recipient. The so-called ephemeral app took off like a rocket, in part because of its popularity as a means for sexting, sending nude or explicit images to other people.

Four years later, the social media app is the most valuable private tech company in Los Angeles, with more than $2.6 billion in outside funding and many more functions than sexting. It carries a variety of sponsored content, image filters, and curated public slide shows known as Live Stories. Its Discover portal also features content from more than a dozen media companies, including the Wall Street Journal, Food Network, and BuzzFeed.

It is those partners, particularly BuzzFeed, with which Geragos’ suit takes issue. BuzzFeed’s Discover portal on Snapchat has published articles titled “10 Things He Thinks When He Can’t Make You Orgasm” and “23 Pictures That Are Too Real If You’ve Ever Had Sex With a Penis.”

In addition to the 14-year-old plaintiff, Geragos is seeking certification for a class action to include the app’s estimated 150 million other users.

Christina DiRusso, BuzzFeed’s director of communications, said the company’s content is popular because of its blunt discussion of sex.

“The notion that positive, frank, and humorous coverage of sex is obscene could only occur to someone who has literally never looked at the internet,” she said.

BuzzFeed was not named in the lawsuit.

“All I’ll say, is one battle at a time,’ said Geragos, who declined to say why he did not sue the content maker.

For its part, Snapchat declined to comment on the merits of the case.

“We haven’t been served with a complaint in this lawsuit, but we are sorry if people were offended,” said Noah Edwardsen, a company spokesman. “Our Discover partners have editorial independence, which is something that we support.”

Protected speech

And though Geragos argues that Snapchat is intimately involved with content creation and has never moved beyond its reliance on explicit content, Llanso of the Center for Democracy & Technology said that doesn’t matter from a legal perspective.

“We are talking about content that is fully protected under the First Amendment,” she said.

For the most part, laws passed in the 1990s that restrict minors’ access to explicit content on the internet, including much of the Communications Decency Act, have been swept away in the courts, said Loyola’s Fischer.

“There’s this humungous carve-out for the internet, protecting the internet to be free from government interference and giving internet hosts tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of what shows up on their site,” he said.

Similarly, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provision was designed to protect websites from content posted on their platforms by individual users who violate others’ copyrights.

In many ways, Geragos’ effort against Snapchat feels out of date, said David Greene, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco.

“It brought back memories from 1996, when we were fighting over the Child Online Protection Act, which gave us the original language of trying to fight indecency,” he said.

Nonetheless, the still-standing notifications provision of the CDA gives legal experts pause and if upheld could create a massive headache to a wide swath of website and app developers.

“It’s an uncommon claim, so it’s a little hard to gauge how a court would deal with it,” said Llanso of Center for Democracy & Technology.

Geragos said there has to be consequences for violating the provision and that Snapchat needs make changes to its app.

“Put some kind of warning in there so the parents know what their kids are looking at,” he said. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask. It’s not exactly a Herculean task on their part.”