Social Media Lawsuits by State Attorneys General Surmount Section 230, Other Challenges
Gabby Miller / Oct 24, 2024
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A series of recent rulings have signaled that courts may no longer allow Section 230 – a 1998 law that provides immunity to online platforms from harms associated with the content posted by third-party users – to be used as a catch-all liability protection for social media platforms. In the past, courts have frequently dismissed lawsuits against social media platforms based on Section 230’s protection. However, the more recent use of novel legal strategies states attorneys general, plaintiffs and school districts are adopting to hold the companies accountable for their conduct, including their design decisions, appears to be the driving factor in clearing these legal hurdles.
Last week, the Suffolk County Superior Court denied Meta’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office in October 2023. The initial filing was part of a bipartisan coalition of 42 state attorneys general who allege Meta’s social media products are harmful to youth. Led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, 33 state attorneys general jointly filed a lawsuit against the company in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, while Massachusetts and eight other states filed lawsuits in their own state courts.
The joint attorneys general federal suit filed in the district court alleged that Meta designed and deployed features on Facebook and Instagram that encouraged addictive behaviors it knew to be harmful to its young users’ mental and physical health. It also claims the company violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a law that imposes obligations on companies to obtain parental consent to collect data on users under 13 years old.
Each of the individual states' complaints adapted their legal strategies to their respective state laws, with some adding claims accusing Meta of negligence and deceptive trade practices, for instance. Specifically, Massachusett Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell opted for a distinct “public nuisance” legal strategy in her state’s suit against Meta–a strategy that hundreds of school districts across the US have been mounting against the social media companies. The Massachusetts suit is accusing Meta of creating a public nuisance by designing Instagram to addict and exploit children’s mental well-being and falsely representing these features to the public.
Superior Court Justice Peter B. Krupp rejected Meta’s assertion that the harms listed in the Massachusett suit were associated with third parties who acted independently from Meta. “The complaint is primarily based on Meta’s own conduct, not third-party content,” according to the 28-page opinion, denying Meta Section 230 immunity from the state’s lawsuit and allowing the public nuisance claim to proceed.
The Justice also dismissed Meta’s assertion that Instagram does not constitute trade or commerce because it’s a free service. The suits’ claim that Meta “derives revenue” by collecting and selling personal data from millions of Massachusetts users, including over 300,000 teens, “plausibly suggests” that Instagram “serves a commercial end and that, therefore, Meta undertook its purportedly unfair and deceptive actions while engaged in trade or commerce,” according to the ruling.
Justice Krupp added that harms listed in the complaint “were foreseeable” and could be “reasonably avoided” because Meta was purportedly aware of the alleged mental and physical harms the overuse of Instagram poses to young users. This plausibly amounts to Meta engaging in unfair conduct and deceptive practices, according to the Superior Court.
The Massachusetts ruling came the same week that US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers allowed the majority of the 33 state attorneys general’s claims to proceed against Meta. The 102-page ruling noted that while Section 230 provides “a fairly significant limitation” on consumer protections, the company’s “alleged yearslong public campaign of deception as to the risks of addiction and mental harms to minors from platform use fits readily within these states’ deceptive acts and practices framework.” Judge Gonzalez Rogers also denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the states’ COPPA claims on grounds that Meta conceded it has actual knowledge of under-13 users on its platform.
The district court ruling is part of sprawling multidistrict litigation (MDL) against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube. This complex federal litigation includes the state attorneys general jointly filed suit, hundreds of private personal injury suits brought by families of youth harmed by the “unreasonably dangerous” design of social media platforms, public nuisance complaints brought by dozens of public school districts, and more. Last November, Judge Gonzalez Rogers allowed a different set of claims to proceed under product liability laws regarding platforms’ defective designs.
TikTok also suffered a legal setback in late September when an appeals court reinstated an Indiana lawsuit against the social media platform that state Attorney General Todd Rokita filed in December 2022. The three-judge panel unanimously reversed a lower court’s decision to throw out the case, which claims TikTok deceived its users of the risks posed by the Chinese government for accessing their personal data and misled parents that the video-sharing app was appropriate for children.
The opinion, written by Judge Paul D. Mathias, stated that Indiana has jurisdiction over California-based TikTok, and that its business model of accessing content in exchange for users’ personal data qualifies as a “consumer transaction” under Indiana’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act, which the underlying suit accuses TikTok of violating. ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, was dismissed from further proceedings.
In response to the legal victory, a spokesperson for Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita told the Associated Press: “We were the first state to file suit against TikTok, but not the last, and it’s reassuring to see others take up this ongoing fight against a foreign Big Tech threat, in any jurisdiction.” Earlier this month, a coalition of 14 additional state attorneys general, led by California and New York Attorneys General Rob Bonta and Letitia James, individually filed suit against the video-sharing app.
The coalition included Massachusetts, which again utilized claims in its lawsuit that TikTok’s behavior amounts to a public nuisance. TikTok may yet try to have the case dismissed on Section 230 grounds, but such arguments might no longer sway the court.
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