More Account Termination Cases Fail in Court

May 1, 2025 · by · in Content Regulation

The account termination lawsuits keep coming, so I’ll keep blogging them.

Housman v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2025 WL 1249157 (D. Nev. April 29, 2025)

This is a pro se/in pro per case. “Plaintiff’s Complaint alleges Defendants Meta, TikTok, X, and Reddit violated her First Amendment rights when each apparently prevented certain content Plaintiff attempted to post on Defendants’ respective platforms from appearing on those publicly available platforms.” The court’s analysis:

Beginning with the obvious, Meta, TikTok, X, and Reddit are private corporations, not government agencies…

Plaintiff alleges that each of the Defendants wrongfully enforced their own rules—community standard rules—despite Plaintiff’s assertion that she did not violate those rules. Plaintiff fails to allege a single fact demonstrating that any action, let alone a specific action, taken by Meta, TikTok, X, or Reddit was traceable or even attributable to some right or privilege created or imposed by the government or by a person for whom the government is responsible. Plaintiff also does not allege that any Defendant performed a traditionally public function. Indeed, there is nothing available to the Court demonstrating the private entities Plaintiff sues could meet this standard. Finally, Plaintiff alleges no facts whatsoever demonstrating that any Defendant was a willful participant in joint activity with the government

The court suggests the plaintiff consider if she has a breach of contract case (spoiler: she does not), but the court redirects the contract claim to state court, perhaps hoping that she can foist this unmeritorious mess on her state court peers and off of her docket.

McCarthy v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2025 WL 1237550 (N.D. Cal. April 28, 2025)

Another pro se/in pro per case. The court summarizes:

Plaintiff Steven M. McCarthy (“Mr. McCarthy”) alleges that he was an active user of Facebook for many years. Mr. McCarthy describes himself as an “armchair historian” and alleges that he would post political cartoons to his Facebook account, including two that are reproduced in his Complaint. Mr. McCarthy contends that after he posted those two cartoons, Defendants disabled his account.

In these partisan times, someone who claims to be an “armchair historian” probably also would style themselves as a heterodox thinker. 🙄

The court opinion intentionally does not depict the cartoons. Their absence created a dilemma for me as a blogger hoping to serve my readers’ interests. Could I just assume that the cartoons were standard MAGA BS, or did I need to do my homework and verify their inappropriateness? I chose the latter because that’s the kind of blogger I am; and, completely unsurprisingly, I immediately regretted my choice. (One cartoon is just stupid; the other is stupid, offensive, propaganistic, and arguably sexist and racist). I will give you the same choice–the cartoons are on page 8 of the complaint–but you have only yourself to blame if you do your own research. Choose wisely.

The court breezily rejects each of his state law claims, including the Florida social media censorship claim that relied on an unconstitutional law that’s enjoined. 🤷‍♂️ With respect to the First Amendment claim:

Mr. McCarthy’s allegations relating to both the state policy and state actor prongs are insufficient under CHD to plausibly allege that the government is responsible for Defendants’ decision to disable his account. For example, Mr. McCarthy does not sufficiently allege that that his account was disabled based on a state policy, rather than Defendants’ terms of service. Although he vaguely alleges that congressional legislators, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Center for Disease Control urged Defendants to engage in censorship through “threatened detrimental legislation,” fails to include any facts about those threats or how they connect to his posts. Mr. McCarthy also alleges that the protections Defendants are afforded by the Communications Decency Act support the inference that they can be considered federal actors. However, the Ninth Circuit rejected that theory in CHD.

On the plus side (?), his first-hand experiences losing this lawsuit might give the plaintiff more inspiration for future political cartoons. 📈

Selected Posts About State Action Claims