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 be used to exclude former Meta employees from testifying at trial about Meta's own internal documents, corporate culture, and first-party representations — as distinct from Meta's role in publishing third-party user content. The question is whether a federal immunity statute designed to protect platforms from liability for user-generated content can also function as an evidentiary bar against testimony that supports deception claims based on the platform's own conduct, and whether a motion in limine is even a proper vehicle for raising that argument.
What Happened
This is an opposition brief filed June 17, 2026 by four State Attorneys General in the trial-preparation stage of MDL No. 3047, responding to Meta's Motion in Limine No. 3, which seeks to exclude testimony from certain former Meta employees on two grounds: that Section 230 bars the testimony, and that it constitutes impermissible lay opinion. The AGs argue that Section 230 is simply inapplicable to their deception claims, which rest on Meta's own affirmative misrepresentations — including a document called the CSER — rather than on anything Meta did as a publisher of third-party content, citing the court's prior ruling in *In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction*, 753 F. Supp. 3d 849 (N.D. Cal. 2024). They further contend that Meta is improperly using a motion in limine as a substitute for a summary judgment motion it never filed, relying on *Kaneka Corp. v. SKC Kolon Pi, Inc.* for the proposition that this procedural vehicle cannot carry that weight. On the lay opinion issue, the AGs argue that former employees are entitled under FRE 701 to testify about corporate culture and conduct they personally observed, and that foundation objections must be resolved witness-by-witness at trial rather than through categorical pretrial exclusion. The AGs also dispute Meta's factual characterizations of the specific witness testimony at issue, contending that Meta misrepresents what several witnesses said and that most of the challenged excerpts were never designated by the AGs in the first place.
Why It Matters
State attorneys general are suing Meta for allegedly deceiving the public about social media's harms to teenagers, and Meta is attempting to block former employee testimony — including apparent whistleblower accounts — by invoking Section 230, a federal statute designed to shield platforms from liability for content posted by their users. The AGs are pressing a meaningful procedural extension of existing doctrine: if Section 230 does not bar the underlying deception claims at the pleadings or summary judgment stage, they argue, it cannot bar the evidence that proves those claims at trial — translating the "platform's own conduct" carve-out from claim viability into the admissibility context, a step courts have rarely been asked to take explicitly. Whether the court accepts that argument or not, the ruling on this motion will signal how broadly Section 230 can be wielded as an evidentiary tool in MDL proceedings with mixed claim portfolios, where some claims survive the immunity and others do not. A second question worth watching is where the line falls under FRE 701 between a former employee's direct observations about institutional culture and inadmissible opinion testimony about organizational intent — an area where circuit-level authority remains thin.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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