Browse Cases
176 resultsCalise v. Meta Platforms, Inc.
Issue: Whether § 230 bars claims that Meta's advertising targeting algorithm matched vulnerable users with fraudulent investment and romance scam advertisements, causing financial losses.
Why It Matters: Applied and extended Barnes v. Yahoo! to Meta's advertising infrastructure, distinguishing between Meta-as-publisher (immune) and Meta-as-developer of its own targeting product (not immune). An important precedent for claims that a platform's monetization algorithms — not just its content-hosting function — can constitute independent conduct outside § 230's reach.
View on CourtListener →Neville v. Snap, Inc.
Issue: Whether § 230 bars California state law products liability and negligence claims against Snap for design features that allegedly facilitated the drug trafficking death of a minor.
Why It Matters: A California state court application of the Lemmon / design-defect framework in the context of the fentanyl crisis. Part of the wave of state court litigation applying design-defect theories to social media features in cases involving drug trafficking and minor victims.
View on CourtListener →Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc.
Issue: Whether § 230 bars the Massachusetts Attorney General's parens patriae claims that Meta designed its platforms to be addictive to children and to expose them to harmful content, in violation of Massachusetts consumer protection law.
Why It Matters: Part of the wave of state attorney general actions against social media platforms for child safety violations. The court's refusal to dismiss on § 230 grounds reflects the growing judicial receptivity to design-defect and deceptive-business-practice theories that target platform architecture rather than content moderation decisions.
View on CourtListener →AYYADURAI v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Issue: Ayyadurai v. United States of America* asks whether a pro se plaintiff can sustain constitutional, statutory, and common-law claims against social media platforms and federal government defendants based on an alleged conspiracy to suppress his political speech, arising from his deplatforming and shadowbanning following posts questioning ballot-image destruction in a prior election. The case requires the court to determine whether Article III standing survives where the alleged suppression stems from claimed government coercion of private platforms, whether § 230 immunizes the platforms' content-moderation decisions, and whether sovereign immunity bars the federal claims — each a distinct threshold that must be cleared before any merits analysis begins.
Why It Matters: The ruling makes two meaningful contributions to § 230 doctrine: it reaffirms that conclusory bad-faith allegations cannot pierce § 230(c)(2)'s good-faith safe harbor at the pleading stage, and it deliberately declines to extend § 230(c)(1) to cover affirmative content-removal decisions — flagging that such an extension would render § 230(c)(2)'s good-faith requirement superfluous, a structural concern previously voiced only in Justice Thomas's *Malwarebytes* cert-denial statement. By resolving all platform claims under (c)(2) alone, the court consciously preserves the (c)(1)-removal question, creating a potential development opportunity in future litigation where a plaintiff pleads bad faith with sufficient specificity to survive (c)(2) and force the (c)(1) issue to appeal. The court's application of *Murthy v. Missouri* to defeat standing on the government-coercion theory also signals that such claims now face an exceptionally high traceability burden in social-media suppression cases, reinforcing *Murthy*'s practical reach well beyond its original First Amendment context.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This motion presents a consequential and underexplored question about whether Section 230's immunity extends to evidentiary proceedings — specifically, whether the statute can be used to exclude testimony that would characterize a platform's internal decisions as publisher or editorial choices, potentially expanding Section 230's reach beyond its traditional role as a liability bar into a trial-stage evidentiary doctrine. The outcome could affect how government plaintiffs in the wave of state AG and AG-parallel cases against Meta are able to introduce internal evidence of platform design and moderation decisions at trial.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This motion represents a notable and relatively rare invocation of Section 230 as a trial-stage evidentiary bar rather than a pleading-stage immunity defense, testing whether §230 can preclude entire categories of evidence concerning platform policy choices — a question with significant implications for how government enforcement actions against platforms can be litigated. The outcome could clarify the extent to which Section 230's publisher immunity principle constrains not just liability theories but the evidentiary record in public-enforcement cases brought by state attorneys general.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: These motions present a significant and relatively rare trial-stage application of Section 230 as an evidentiary bar in a state attorney general enforcement action, directly testing the scope of Section 230 immunity against failure-to-warn, misrepresentation, and unfair business practices claims premised on Meta's publishing decisions and platform design — an important front in the ongoing litigation over whether Section 230 shields platform design choices and moderation policies from state consumer protection enforcement.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This filing sharpens three doctrinal pressure points simultaneously. First, by framing Meta's UX and algorithmic architecture as standalone liability-generating conduct divorced from the third-party content they deliver, the AGs are asking the court to draw — at summary judgment and as a matter of law — the line between immunized content-presentation choices and non-immunized product design that courts have struggled to locate since the *Instagram MDL* proceedings. Second, the COPPA actual-knowledge argument, if credited, would represent one of the first Article III holdings imposing COPPA liability on a major platform through litigation rather than consent decree, generating immediate pressure for circuit-level resolution. Third, the "directed to children" theory applied to a general-audience platform with heavy minor usership pushes the § 312.2 definition well beyond prior FTC enforcement targets, and if adopted, would effectively require any platform with substantial underage engagement to comply with COPPA's full consent regime regardless of marketing intent — a structural shift with industry-wide consequences.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: Meta's central defense at summary judgment is that Section 230 extinguishes the states' consumer protection claims before they can reach a jury, on the theory that those claims would effectively hold Meta liable as a publisher of harmful user-generated content. The Massachusetts Supreme Court — one of the most respected state courts of last resort in the country — just rejected that argument in a case involving the same defendant and a structurally similar legal theory, and Plaintiffs are placing that ruling before the MDL judge at the earliest opportunity. Whether it moves the needle depends on how closely the Massachusetts claims and pleadings track those at issue in the MDL, a question the filing conspicuously leaves unaddressed and that Meta will almost certainly contest. The filing also signals a deliberate multi-forum strategy by the state AGs: collecting appellate-level authority across jurisdictions to build persuasive momentum against Section 230 preemption — a campaign worth watching as similar litigation proceeds in other states.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: The opinion is the most prominent state appellate-court decision to date to categorically hold that Section 230 does not immunize platform design-defect or product-deception claims, and it does so through a textually grounded, common-law publisher framework that is methodologically distinct from — and directly contests — the reasoning this MDL court has previously applied. By naming and rejecting the MDL court's prior rulings, the SJC supplies a reasoned, appellate-level counter-analysis that, while not binding in federal court, materially reduces those rulings' persuasive authority and gives this Court a fully developed alternative framework to consider when resolving the pending motion. The procedural holding — that Section 230 immunity supports interlocutory appeal under the present-execution doctrine — also signals that state courts of last resort are prepared to treat Section 230 as a true immunity from suit, consistent with federal consensus but now carrying explicit state appellate endorsement. What remains open is whether this Court will credit the SJC's common-law publisher test over its own prior analysis, a question that will be resolved when it rules on Related Doc. 266.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This filing advances the critical and unsettled question of whether §230 immunizes a platform's affirmative design decisions—such as algorithmic features allegedly engineered to maximize adolescent engagement—when challenged by state enforcement authorities rather than private plaintiffs, potentially establishing that state AG consumer protection actions targeting platform architecture fall outside §230's immunity.
View on CourtListener →L.W. v. Snap Inc.
Issue: Whether § 230 bars products liability and negligence claims against social media platforms for designing features — including addictive engagement loops, infinite scroll, and content recommendation — that allegedly caused serious psychological harm to minor users.
Why It Matters: An important district court application of the post-Lemmon design-defect doctrine to the broader youth mental health litigation against social media platforms. The court's willingness to allow design claims to proceed past a motion to dismiss reflected the growing judicial recognition that § 230 does not immunize all harms that can be traced to social media platform design.
View on CourtListener →Arizona, State of v. Michael D Lansky LLC
Issue: In *Arizona v. Michael D. Lansky LLC*, defendants Avid Telecom, Michael D. Lansky, and Stacey Reeves argue that a VoIP transmission intermediary qualifies as an interactive computer service provider under 47 U.S.C. § 230, immunizing it from TCPA liability for robocall content originated by third-party customers. The motion also presses whether post-*Loper Bright* courts must independently interpret TCPA consent and identification rules free from FCC deference, whether Reeves's role as an alleged independent contractor defeats personal liability, and whether six state TCPA-analog statutes are preempted by federal law — each question arising against a factual record in which defendants concede some operational control over Reeves's assignments.
Why It Matters: The § 230 immunity argument is the most doctrinally ambitious element of this filing: no circuit court has applied § 230 to robocall transmission infrastructure, and if a district court accepts the theory, it would extend internet content-moderation immunity well beyond its established domain and likely invite legislative or regulatory response. The *Loper Bright*-to-TCPA pipeline argument is worth watching independently — if courts in the Ninth Circuit adopt the position that FCC consent and caller-identification rules lack binding force, TCPA enforcement could fragment along circuit lines, creating a patchwork of judicially reinterpreted obligations for carriers, enforcement agencies, and plaintiffs alike. The personal liability question for Reeves, if resolved at the circuit level, would also provide useful guidance on the conditions under which corporate officers and contractors in telemarketing operations bear individual TCPA exposure.
View on CourtListener →Gonzalez v. Google LLC
Issue: Whether § 230(c)(1) immunizes Google from Anti-Terrorism Act liability for YouTube's algorithmic recommendations of ISIS videos, on the theory that targeted algorithmic recommendations constitute Google's own expressive conduct rather than merely hosting third-party content.
Why It Matters: The Supreme Court's first opportunity to definitively address § 230's application to algorithmic content recommendations produced no ruling on that question. The Court's restraint left the circuit split between Force v. Facebook (Second Circuit, algorithmic recommendations are publisher activity) and Anderson v. TikTok (Third Circuit, targeted recommendations are platform speech) unresolved. Gonzalez is significant as much for what it did not decide as for what it held — the most pressing open question in § 230 doctrine remains unanswered at the Supreme Court level.
View on CourtListener →Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh
Issue: Whether Twitter, Facebook, and Google aided and abetted an ISIS terrorist attack under 18 U.S.C. § 2333(d)(2) by hosting ISIS content, allowing ISIS to recruit and raise funds on their platforms, and algorithmically recommending ISIS-related content to users.
Why It Matters: Established that online platforms do not face ATA aiding-and-abetting liability merely by knowingly hosting content from a terrorist organization or operating recommendation algorithms that surface that content, without evidence of specific, targeted assistance to the tortious act at issue. The decision effectively disposed of most terrorism-based ATA claims against social media platforms on the merits, without reaching § 230 — the companion case Gonzalez v. Google addressed § 230 but declined to decide it, leaving that question open.
View on CourtListener →Bride v. Snap, Inc.
Issue: Whether § 230 bars wrongful death claims against Snap arising from Snapchat's design features — including its anonymous messaging and ephemeral content features — allegedly used to facilitate drug trafficking that resulted in a teenager's death.
Why It Matters: A significant application of the Lemmon design-defect framework to the fentanyl trafficking epidemic on social media platforms. Part of a growing body of litigation testing whether the Lemmon exception is limited to specific features like speed filters or extends broadly to platform design choices that facilitate offline criminal conduct. The case contributed to the litigation that eventually produced Estate of Bride v. Yolo Technologies in the Ninth Circuit.
View on CourtListener →Prager Univ. v. Google LLC
Issue: Whether YouTube, as a private company, violated the First Amendment or California unfair competition law by restricting PragerU's videos through its "Restricted Mode" and "Ad Friendly" content policies.
Why It Matters: Rejected both constitutional and statutory challenges to viewpoint-based content moderation by private platforms. Confirmed that private social media companies are not state actors bound by the First Amendment. The decision also illustrates how platforms' terms of service — which expressly reserve broad editorial discretion — can defeat contract-based and consumer protection challenges to content moderation.
View on CourtListener →NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta
Issue: NetChoice v. Bonta* asks whether a facial First Amendment challenge can sustain a wholesale injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act when the statute's coverage definition reaches businesses through both content-based and purely demographic indicators — meaning some covered services may have no expressive dimension at all. The case also asks whether terms like "best interests of children" and "materially detrimental," borrowed from individualized family-law proceedings, are unconstitutionally vague when applied as prospective, industry-wide compliance standards. The answers turn on how courts measure the proportion of unconstitutional applications against all applications under the demanding framework the Supreme Court established in *Moody v. NetChoice* (2024).
Why It Matters: This ruling significantly raises the evidentiary bar for industry coalitions seeking to block child online-safety laws through facial First Amendment challenges: plaintiffs must now map a statute's *entire* universe of applications — including non-expressive ones — before a court can find unconstitutional applications substantial enough to justify a wholesale injunction. The vagueness holding breaks new ground by applying *FCC v. Fox*'s void-for-vagueness standard to child-welfare design mandates, establishing that family-law welfare terms cannot be transplanted into prospective regulatory compliance obligations without adequate definitional grounding. Significant questions remain open on remand, including whether the age-estimation requirement implicates First Amendment-protected speech and whether the CAADCA's valid provisions are severable — determinations that will shape California's enforcement posture and may influence how courts in other circuits assess analogous age-gating laws.
View on CourtListener →Henderson v. Source for Pub. Data, L.P.
Issue: Whether § 230(c)(1) immunizes a data broker that aggregates public records, parses and reformats them into a proprietary database, and sells consumer reports — against claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act that the broker failed to maintain accurate records and provide required disclosures.
Why It Matters: A significant Fourth Circuit decision limiting § 230's reach for data brokers that do not merely aggregate and pass along information but actively transform and repackage it into new content. The opinion contrasts with the district court's broader reading and with FTC v. Accusearch, which turned on illegal data acquisition methods. Henderson establishes that § 230 does not protect a data broker that creates its own summaries and reformatted versions of records — at that point, the broker is an information content provider, not a passive publisher.
View on CourtListener →IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION
Issue: In *In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation*, the State Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey argue that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act cannot immunize Meta from misrepresentation claims grounded in the company's own affirmative false statements about platform safety — even where those statements reference content-moderation practices or the handling of third-party content. The question is made non-obvious by two recent Ninth Circuit decisions, *Estate of Bride v. YOLO Tech.* and *Doe v. Grindr*, which Meta is expected to read broadly as extending immunity to design-and-moderation representations, and by Meta's procedural choice to raise the immunity argument for the first time through a motion in limine rather than at the dismissal or summary judgment stage.
Why It Matters: This filing maps the most actively contested doctrinal fault line in the social-media MDL: whether Section 230 immunity can reach a platform's own affirmative misrepresentations when those statements concern how the platform manages third-party content, and whether that immunity argument can be revived at the in limine stage after lying dormant through dismissal and summary judgment. The AGs' reading of *Bride* and *Grindr* — confining those decisions to publisher-role claims — is doctrinally significant but contested; if Meta persuades the court that misrepresentations about content moderation are inherently representations about third-party content handling, a substantial category of deception-based claims could be imperiled. The procedural forfeiture theory, if credited, would be a notable development in MDL practice, signaling that Section 230 must be raised and preserved at the dispositive-motion stage or risk being treated as waived. A ruling on this motion — in either direction — is likely to produce Ninth Circuit guidance that will either solidify the misrepresentation carve-out as a clean doctrinal category or begin to erode it where editorial and deceptive conduct are intertwined.
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