Meta and TikTok tried to defeat thousands of social media addiction lawsuits in one fell swoop, but an appeals court rejected the attempt in a ruling issued yesterday.
First up among the lawsuits is a case brought against Meta by the California attorney general and other state AGs. Meta said in a July court filing that the state AGs’ demands for damages would amount to more than $1.4 trillion. A trial in district court is scheduled to start on August 19, with jury selection beginning August 12.
In a 3-0 ruling yesterday, a judges’ panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the Meta and TikTok claims that they have legal immunity to the lawsuits under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
“Because Section 230 merely provides a defense to liability—not immunity from suit—we lack appellate jurisdiction to review the district court’s rulings on an interlocutory basis. Therefore, we dismiss Meta’s and TikTok’s appeals,” judges wrote. They added in a footnote that “Meta’s emergency motion to stay trial pending resolution of this appeal is denied as moot.”
Meta was the main company claiming immunity from the lawsuits. The 9th Circuit ruling said that “the TikTok entities have not independently briefed any of the issues and merely join in Meta’s arguments.”
Although Section 230 limits liability for online platforms that host third-party content, Congress didn’t give companies an explicit guarantee that they will not face trials, the 9th Circuit judges’ panel said. “When Congress wants to create immunity from suit, it knows how to say so unequivocally,” judges said.
State AGs say “Meta deceived the public”
The ruling allows a trial to proceed this month over consumer protection claims brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. State attorneys general recently responded to Meta’s complaint about the amount of damages the states are seeking.
“Meta’s concern over the potential size of the requested remedies rings hollow in light of the evidence the AGs will present at trial,” the state AGs said in a court filing. “The AGs will prove that Meta deceived the public about the safety of its platforms while deliberately designing them to induce compulsive use and increase revenue.”
Separate trials will be held in district court for the claims of other plaintiffs, including 25 other state AGs that allege violations of state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Yesterday’s 9th Circuit ruling is also a win for individuals who sued over personal-injury claims, and plaintiffs including local governments and school districts from around the country.
“The multidistrict litigation in the district court involves thousands of lawsuits alleging that Meta’s social media platforms Facebook and Instagram ‘encourage addictive behavior, fail to verify users’ ages, encourage adolescents to bypass parental controls, and inadequately safeguard against harmful content and/or intentionally amplify harmful and exploitive content,’” the ruling said.
A ruling for Meta and TikTok also would have helped Google and Snapchat, because those companies are defendants in the massive litigation being held in US District Court for the Northern District of California. A Reuters article said the consolidated case includes more than 3,000 lawsuits.
Meta appealed before final judgment
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers mostly denied a Meta motion to dismiss in an order in October 2024. As Gonzalez Rogers wrote, the case consolidates “actions brought on behalf of children and adolescents, school districts and local government entities, and state attorneys general alleging that several social media companies—Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat—designed their platforms to foster compulsive use by minors, resulting in a variety of harms to children, local governments, and the public health.”
Gonzalez Rogers imposed some limits on the plaintiffs’ claims, finding that “Section 230 insulates the design and deployment of most features alleged to be unfair or unconscionable.” But she declined “to dismiss at this stage theories of liability predicated on a failure-to-warn of known risks of addiction attendant to any platform features or as to platform construction in general.”
The denial of Meta’s motion to dismiss is called an “interlocutory order” because it’s not a final judgment in the case. Interlocutory decisions generally can’t be appealed immediately, but there are exceptions.
Meta claimed that rulings denying Section 230 immunity are “collateral orders” and thus can be appealed before a case has a final judgment. But Meta needed to show, among other things, that the district court’s decision is “effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment.”
Judges deny immunity
Meta argued that the 9th Circuit itself “has repeatedly held that Section 230 confers immunity from suit.” The judges’ panel acknowledged that the court has “used the phrase ‘immunity’ somewhat loosely in our section 230 jurisprudence,” but said that word usage is not binding, “because we have never addressed whether the denial of a section 230 defense is a collateral order.”
“Only the Tenth Circuit has squarely addressed the issue before us, and it concluded that section 230 ‘provides immunity from liability, not suit, and [a] district court’s order [denying immunity] does not qualify under the collateral order doctrine,’” the 9th Circuit decision said.
The law does not have an explicit guarantee that a trial will not occur, and immunity from lawsuits is a benefit usually reserved for government officials, the court said, agreeing with the 10th Circuit analysis.
“Therefore, we hold that Section 230 provides a defense to liability, not immunity from suit, and an order denying this defense can be effectively reviewed on appeal from a final judgment,” the 9th Circuit said.
In yet another case brought by New Mexico’s attorney general, a state-court judge last week ordered Meta to pay $567 million for youth mental health care and related services to alleviate the “public nuisance” created by its social media platforms. Meta was also ordered by a jury to pay $375 million in civil penalties during an earlier phase of the New Mexico case.
