* * *

The court summarizes the state’s claims:

The Commonwealth alleges that Meta Platforms, Inc., and Instagram, LLC (collectively, Meta), engaged in unfair business practices by designing the Instagram platform to induce compulsive use by children, engaged in deceptive business practices by deliberately misleading the public about the safety of the platform, and created a public nuisance by engaging in these unfair and deceptive practices.

Meta moved to dismiss on Section 230 and other grounds. The lower court denied the motion. Meta sought an interlocutory appeal, which the MA Supreme Court permitted, but only to review the Section 230 issue.

In this ruling, the MA Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the lower court that Section 230 didn’t immunize Meta when “the claims allege harm stemming from Meta’s own conduct either by designing a social media platform that capitalizes on the developmental vulnerabilities of children or by affirmatively misleading consumers about the safety of the Instagram platform.”

Section 230

Treated as Publisher

The court starts with its own “plain language” review of what it means to be treated as a publisher. When courts decide to review a 1996 statute from scratch in 2026, after over a thousand Section 230 cases have been decided, that’s usually an indicator that they are engaging in results-oriented decision-making, they don’t like the precedent, and they need another way to reach a different result.

Worse, the court extensively analyzes the word “publisher” but doesn’t say a word about the companion “speaker” term that appears two words later in the statute. This is another indicator of results-oriented decision-making. No matter what the court says “publisher” means, if the court disregards one of the other 26 words that has direct relevance to its meaning, the court is failing its #1 job of reading the damn statute. This omission is extremely embarrassing for the court, and it thoroughly undermines the credibility of the court’s recitation of precedent.

(I would say that the botched statutory reading would be the kind of thing that should be fixed on appeal, but the US Supreme Court’s specialty is selectively reading statutes and precedent to support results-oriented decision-making, so I guess other courts are emboldened to do that too…?)

The court tries to sum up its “plain language” review. Citing the awful Henderson 4th Circuit (which the Fourth Circuit itself has implicitly repudiated), the court says:

These courts have rejected the argument that § 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability “anytime there is a ‘but-for’ causal relationship between the act of publication and liability,” as it “bears little relation to publisher liability at common law.” Engaging in traditional publishing activity “alone is not enough.”…

(Note: along the way, the court includes quotes of the mockable “get-out-of-jail-free” and “lawless no-mans-land” characterizations of 230, despite my prior debunking of both phrases. Another way the court undermined its own credibility).

Because “the plain meaning of the statute lends itself to competing constructions,” the court then turns to the legislative history for more insight into the meaning of the word “publisher.” This leads to the one-millionth retelling of the Cubby/Stratton Oakmont storyline, with no new payoffs.

Instead, citing Henderson again, the court restates the statutory language in garbled fashion: “Congress intended to immunize interactive computer service providers against claims that would hold them liable as intermediaries for injuries caused by information provided by third-party users of their platforms.”

Relying on that garbled restatement, the court says:

we decline Meta’s invitation to read § 230(c)(1) immunity so broadly as to encompass all claims that implicate publishing activities regardless of whether the claims seek to hold the service provider liable for the content of the information published….

a claim treats a provider as a publisher of information where it meets both the dissemination and content elements.

I’d need to see how Meta argued this, but it feels like the court is rejecting a strawman. Meta publishes third-party content–everyone agrees on that. The service features challenged by the state AG relate to the manner in which Meta presents that third-party content to Meta’s audience. To me, a publisher’s choices of what third-party content to publish and how to publish that third-party content are integrated decisions. In other words, the content selection and presentation decisions are part of the same publication decision. As an analogy, consider a dead-trees newspaper’s decision to publish a story: it is equally part of the newspaper’s editorial prerogative and publication decisions to decide to publish the story at all and to decide if the story should appear on the A1 front page or some interior page; what size typeface to use for the story headline; whether the story runs all on the same page or continues on a later page; etc. As applied to Meta, the decision to vary the delivery timing of new third-party content items (as one example) is just as much of Meta’s publication decision-making process about publishing the third-party content as whether the item will be published at all.

In any case, by saying that 230 only applies to claims that derive from the substance of the third-party content item, the court can disregard a LOT of precedent that applied Section 230 to design defects. The court says the only oppositional precedent is some language in the Social Media Addiction federal decision, which the court denigrates by saying the judge in that case “did not appear to consider the common-law origins of publisher liability or the statute’s legislative history. We are not persuaded by its reasoning.” [Yes, it’s jarring to see Meta cite the CA social media addiction case as support for its position given that how poorly the California cases have been going for Meta.]

Liability Based on Third-Party Content

Claim for unfair business practices. Having said that Section 230 distinguishes the decisions of what content to publish (230-protected) and how to present it (not protected by 230), the court is positioned to uphold all of the claims.

The court says: “The challenged design features (e.g., infinite scroll, autoplay, IVR, and ephemeral content) concern how, whether, and for how long information is published, but the published information itself is not the source of the harm alleged.”

Meta responded that “in the absence of third-party content, the design features could not facilitate addiction in young users.” (My framing: if social media delivers third-party content, what exactly are users “addicted” to?). The court replies:

But the fact that the features require some content to function is not controlling; instead…to satisfy the content element, we look to whether the claim seeks to hold Meta liable for harm stemming from third-party information that it published. Here, the unfair business practices claim does not; the Commonwealth alleges that the features themselves prolong users’ time on the platform, not that any information contained in third-party posts does so. In this sense, the claim is indifferent as to the content published…

the fact that a claim concerns publishing activities, including the use of algorithms in connection with publishing activities, is not enough to bring the claim within the immunity provided by § 230(c)(1)

In a footnote, the court adds: “with respect to the notifications feature, Meta appears to be the information content provider.” But…what content is included in the notifications, and where does it come from?

In a slight piece of good news, the court rejects the state’s Lemmon v. Snap analogy because Lemmon’s “claims did not concern the provider’s publishing activity at all. [Eric’s note: the Lemmon plaintiffs expressly disclaimed all liability based on the content produced by the filter.] By contrast, here, the challenged features are publishing tools that control how Meta publishes content to users of its platform.” I wish more courts would similarly reject the plaintiffs’ many miscitations to Lemmon.

Claim for deceptive business practices. The claim “is based on Meta’s own speech — its allegedly false statements that Instagram is safe and not addictive, and that Meta prioritizes young users’ well-being, despite internal reports and communications suggesting awareness of the harmful effects of Instagram.” There are obvious puffery/opinion defenses that could apply here (see, e.g., the YOLO remand in Bride v. Snap, Inc., 2026 WL 855148 (C.D. Cal. March 16, 2026) that I will eventually blog) but are not at issue in the 230 discussion.

Also, some courts have applied Section 230 to false advertising claims when those claims are fundamentally based on how the service handles its content moderation decisions, such as claims about “safety.” The court doesn’t acknowledge that precedent and instead treats Section 230 as categorically inapplicable to false advertising claims.

Claim for defective age-gating. “the claim focuses on Meta’s own affirmative misstatements about the inaccessibility of its platform to underage users.” Another possible puffery issue.

Nuisance. I’ve previously complained before about courts’ complete undertheorizing of how and why public nuisance claims can apply to social media, and this court doesn’t do any better. In a footnote, here is the court’s entire discussion about Section 230’s application to the public nuisance claim: “Because we conclude that § 230(c)(1) does not bar counts I to III, we also conclude that it does not bar the Commonwealth’s public nuisance claim, which is predicated on the same allegedly unfair and deceptive practices in counts I to III.”

What Happens Next?

Meta could appeal this ruling to the US Supreme Court. That would be a risky move because the US Supreme Court could really go sideways on a decision like this. Also, I’m skeptical the US Supreme Court would grant cert.

Meta could choose to prioritize winning this case on remand on non-230 grounds. For example, the MA Supreme Court validated that Meta’s service features at issue are part of its content publication process. Perhaps that will revitalize Meta’s First Amendment defense?

Whether Meta chooses to appeal or double-down on remand, it’s likely that the CA federal and state court social media addiction cases will have important new developments before any material developments happen in this case. Those developments could swamp the effects of this lawsuit. For example, if Meta loses more bellwether trials in California, the outcome of this case may be comparatively inconsequential.

Quo Vadis Section 230?

This is not a good opinion for Section 230 on several dimensions.

First, as a state supreme court decision, it’s the final word for the Massachusetts state court system (unless the US Supreme Court intervenes). It provides a major beachhead for other courts to follow, both within Massachusetts and beyond.

Second, this court didn’t rely on the Lemmon “design defect” workaround. Instead, it said that the claim doesn’t relate to third-party content unless it’s based on the substance of the third-party content. This provides plaintiffs with another avenue to work around Section 230 in addition to the Lemmon/design defect workaround that other courts are accepting (even if they shouldn’t).

Third, as I explained, I don’t see any distinction between third-party content and the editorial choices about the manner of presenting that third-party content. By embracing that false dichotomy, the court invites plaintiffs to reframe their complaints to focus on content presentation instead of substance. Here’s how a plaintiff’s argument could look: “I’m not suing about the third-party content, I’m suing about the design choices that elevated that third-party content over others.” These are literally the same thing in my mind. If this argument works, Section 230 is dead because plaintiffs will always embrace that workaround.

Even if this opinion doesn’t outright eliminate Section 230 in Massachusetts, it’s a sign of how 230 workarounds keep proliferating, contributing to the swiss cheese-ification of Section 230. When the bubbles in the swiss cheese become too large, the cheese wedge lacks structural integrity and falls apart. That is where 230 is heading, if it’s not already there.

Case Citation: Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2026 WL 969430 (Mass. Supreme Jud. Ct. April 10, 2026)

The post With Opinions Like This, Congress Doesn’t Need to Repeal Section 230–Massachusetts v. Meta appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

This ruling follows a jury verdict in a New Mexico trial against Meta involving similar arguments. The NM jury imposed $375M in damages.

Together, these rulings indicate that juries are willing to impose major liability on social media providers based on claims of social media addiction. That liability exposure jeopardizes the entire social media industry. There are thousands of other plaintiffs with pending claims; and with potentially millions of dollars at stake for each victim, many more will emerge. The total amount of damages at issue could be many tens of billions of dollars.

The Los Angeles jury verdict is the first of three bellwether trials in Los Angeles, with more bellwether trials to follow in summer in the federal case. As such, today’s verdict is just one datapoint about liability and damages. The other trials could reach divergent outcomes, so this jury verdict isn’t the final word on any matter.

The social media defendants will appeal the adverse jury verdicts. They have several good grounds for an appeal, including how products liability claims apply to intangible services, questions about who caused the victims’ harms, and the scope of speech-protective doctrines like the First Amendment and Section 230. If the appeals court disagrees with the lower court on one or more of these issues or others, the jury verdicts might be reduced or wiped away entirely.

In parallel with the court cases, legislatures have enacted laws providing remedies against social media services and others that substantially overlap the plaintiffs’ claims. No matter what happens in the trials, social media services also will have to avoid or overturn those laws as well if they hope to retain the status quo.

Due to the legal pressure from the jury verdicts and the enacted and pending legislation, the social media industry faces existential legal liability and inevitably will need to reconfigure their core offerings if they can’t get broad-based relief on appeal. While any reconfiguration of social media offerings may help some victims, the changes will almost certainly harm many other communities that rely upon and derive important benefits from social media today. Those other communities didn’t have any voice in the trial; and their voices are at risk of being silenced on social media as well.

* * *

I did an interview with a reporter in response to this statement:

Reporter: “Could you say a bit more about how Section 230 might be back in play during the appeal? Do you believe the court’s ruling that Section 230 didn’t apply will be a big facet of the defendants’ argument during appeal?”

Me: The lower court rejected Section 230’s application to large parts of the plaintiffs’ case, holding that the claims sought to impose liability on how social media services configured their offerings and not third-party content. But social media’s offerings consist of third-party content, and the configurations were publishers’ editorial decisions about how to present it. So the line between first-party “design” choices and publication decisions about third-party content seems illusory to me. An appellate court will have to address this.

Reporter: “are you saying it’s likely they’ll appeal on the grounds that social media isn’t a product like tobacco, and argue that the real cause of harm was something else (family life, school, etc)?”

Me: KGM’s life was full of trauma. The social media defendants argued that the harms she suffered were due to that trauma and not her social media usage. (Indeed, there was some evidence that social media helped KGM cope with her trauma). It is highly likely that most or all of the other plaintiffs in the social media addiction cases have sources of trauma in their lives that might negate the responsibility of social media.

Reporter: “Do you think the verdict in the LA trial sets any legal precedent?”

Me: This is just one of three bellwether trials, so the trial was designed to provide one datapoint about potential liability. Having said that, regulators and plaintiffs around the globe are surely going to feel emboldened by the jury verdict to impose their views on how social media services should publish content.

Reporter: “Does this verdict make it more likely that the others will have a similar outcome?”

Me: Not necessarily. Both the plaintiff and defense lawyers will iterate their presentations and hone their messages for the next trials. Also, the victims’ cricumstances will be different. Further, the jury verdict was not unanimous, so a different jury might have reached a different outcome.

Reporter: “Do you think the defendants/social platforms will have to reconfigure their core offerings? And if so, what will it take?”

Me: The legislation being passed around the country and the globe are already going to require major changes to social media. It remains to be seen if the social media services can find reasons to overcome the legislative requirements. If not, the legislatures will keep mandating changes to control social media publication decisions in every respect. For now, it’s not clear yet how social media services will have to change to satisfy the large number of lawsuits and legislative orders they are facing. A reminder that any configuration changes don’t just affect the victims, they affect everyone. As a result, social media users who find the services beneficial and helpful today might anticipate that the services will become less so over time.

The post Comments on the Jury Verdict in the Los Angeles Social Media Addiction Bellwether Trial (Expanded/Updated) appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Weiss v. Google LLC, 2026 WL 733788 (Cal. App. Ct. March 16, 2026)

Weiss’ business started running financial services ads on Google in 2015. Google suspended the ads multiple times, until Google issued a final suspension in 2024. The court says Section 230 protects Google’s suspension decisions.

The court starts with standard context-setting: “California’s appellate courts and federal courts have also generally interpreted section 230 to confer broad immunity on interactive computer services.”

The court continues:

Weiss seeks to adjudicate Google’s characterization of his business and its decision to suspend its ads. However, this conduct, i.e., Google’s “refusal to allow certain content on its platform,” is “typical publisher conduct protected by section 230” regardless of the reason for that refusal….

even if Google’s characterization of Weiss’s advertisements does not align with Weiss’s characterization, section 230 still affords Google immunity from liability for its decision to suspend his content…

all the content Weiss claims Google wrongfully suspended was admittedly created by Weiss, not Google…

Google’s determination that Weiss’s ads violated its general policies is not equivalent to contributing to the ads’ content.

In a footnote, the court adds: “Weiss seeks to hold Google liable for its enforcement of its own general policies, rather than a breach of a specific promise.”

When the dust settles, this becomes just another failed lawsuit over account terminations and content removals.

A reminder of the content moderation dilemma Google faces here. A few courts have said that Facebook doesn’t qualify for Section 230 protection for running scammy ads (e.g., Forrest v. Facebook). As a result, Google has good reason to suspend Weiss’ ads to manage its own liability exposure. At the same time, if Weiss succeeded with his claims here, then Google would have been potentially liable for removing ads based on Google’s fears that they are scammy. This would force Google to deploy a Goldilocks version of content moderation: Google would have to get its ad removal policy “just right,” with potential liability for mistakes in either direction. An impossible challenge.

Thompson v. The Meet Group, 2026 WL 730134 (E.D. Pa. March 16, 2026)

Thompson said Tagged deactivated his livestreaming account and stole $10k from him.

For reasons that aren’t obvious to me, Tagged defended on Section 230(c)(2)(A) grounds instead of 230(c)(1). Maybe this has something to do with trying to navigate around the abysmal Anderson v. TikTok case? EDPa courts are bound by that decision.

The court says Tagged can’t establish the 230(c)(2)(A) defense elements on a motion to dismiss: “application of CDA immunity in this case requires assessment of facts that are not in the pleadings—such as the reason why Thompson’s account was disabled and the content of Thompson’s posts.” Also, Thompson’s allegations of theft might defeat 230(c)(2)(A)’s good faith prerequisite. Cites to Smith v. TRUSTe and e-ventures v. Google.

No matter, the case fails anyway. (Another example of Section 230 not being the only reason why lawsuits lose). The court says the plaintiff had no property interest in his social media account that could be converted (cite to Eagle v. Morgan). The plaintiff’s TOS breach claim fails multiple ways, including the TOS’s reservation of termination rights and damages waiver.

So this becomes yet another failed lawsuit over account terminations, just not due to Section 230. You already know this, but if you’re a defendant in these cases, you should be focusing on 230(c)(1), not 230(c)(2)(A).

Gehringer v. Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2026 WL 734526 (N.D. Cal. March 16, 2026)

Plaintiffs are individuals who have not subscribed to the Ancestry.com service and have not consented to the use of their name or photograph. They allege Ancestry not only includes their yearbook information on a searchable database, but also utilizes their likenesses as part of advertisements for Ancestry.com services…

Plaintiffs contend Ancestry used their likeness in three forms of “advertising”: 1) publication of the yearbook information on a database that contains a paywall for certain features; 2) dissemination of emails to potential Ancestry.com subscribers, noting Ancestry Hints® can expand their family tree, and using the names and images of Plaintiffs as examples; and 3) an Ancestry free trial program that allows potential subscribers to access Plaintiffs’ yearbook information for a limited time.

The court nixes claims over category #1 and #3 ads due to copyright preemption.

As for the category #2 ads:

Plaintiffs allege Ancestry crafted email advertisements that included their likenesses to encourage potential customers to subscribe to Ancestry’s service. The email advertisements were not created by a third-party user of Ancestry.com—Ancestry authored the content, and as such, it is “responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation” of that offending content. To avoid this conclusion, Ancestry attempts to recast the allegations in the First Amended Complaint, asserting Ancestry merely “republish[es] yearbook photos taken and first published by Esperanza High School.” But as the screenshots in the Complaint confirm, the emails sent by Ancestry to prospective users include far more than republished images of Plaintiffs; they incorporate those images into an advertisement for the Ancestry Hints® functionality and Ancestry’s subscription service. Drawing all inferences in Plaintiffs’ favor, Section 230 does not immunize Ancestry against liability for the content of the alleged email advertisements

Notice that Ancestry’s ad creation practices go further than Facebook’s sponsored stories, which also didn’t qualify for Section 230 protection.

State v. Sharak, 2026 WI 4 (Wis. Supreme Ct. Feb. 24, 2026)

Google scanned Sharak’s Google Photo uploads, identified what it thought was CSAM, and submitted a CyberTip. Sharak argued that Google was conducting the search on the state’s behalf. The court disagrees and upholds Sharak’s conviction.

That isn’t unusual. What’s more unusual is the court’s discussion of Section 230. “Rauch Sharak argues that [Section 230(c)(2)’s safe harbor] encourages ESPs to scan for CSAM by granting immunity to ESPs that moderate content and creating civil and criminal liability if ESPs do not scan for CSAM.”

The court responds:

Though § 230(c) may grant immunity to ESPs that choose to scan for CSAM, it does not require, reward, or incentivize scanning for CSAM in the first place. Moreover, § 230(c)(2)(A) grants immunity for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to” obscene material, which sweeps far more broadly than would be required to induce Google’s CSAM scan at issue here….

Even if the statutes encourage Google to scan for CSAM or provide a law-enforcement purpose, Rauch Sharak has not shown that they are enough to turn Google into an instrument or agent of the government.

Alice Rosenblum v. Passes Inc., 2026 WL 711837 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 3, 2026)

[The fact allegations are based on the court’s summary of the complaint.] Passes is a competitor to OnlyFans. Unlike its rivals, Passes allows 15-17 year olds to create accounts with parental consent. Guo is the CEO, and Celestin is a content acquisition specialist. At Guo’s direction, Celestin personally reached out to 17-year-old Alice Rosenblum to create a Passes account. Celestin did a photoshoot of Rosenblum and (with Guo’s help) created a Passes account for her without requiring parental consent.

“Over the next month, while Plaintiff was still 17 years old, Celestin and Ginoza [another Passes employee] allegedly directed Plaintiff to create sexually explicit images and videos of herself….the FAC provides over 14 examples of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”) involving Plaintiff, being marketed on the Passes platform for $69 to $4,000. Furthermore, Passes agents posing as Plaintiff allegedly communicated via direct message to “big spenders” to continue to market and sell CSAM involving Plaintiff.”

The court rejects Passes’ and Guo’s Section 230 defense:

Section 230 immunity plainly does not apply to Plaintiff’s claims. To be sure, Plaintiff does largely seek to hold Passes Defendants liable as providers of an interactive computer service, and several allegations treat Passes as a publisher, as they involve Passes’ distribution of CSAM involving Plaintiff…Plaintiff alleges that Passes and its agents were directly responsible for the creation and portrayal of the CSAM on the Passes platform: Plaintiff alleges that Celestin, acting as an agent of Passes, personally took at least one photo of Plaintiff which was uploaded to Passes, and further instructed her to create specific photographs and videos and upload them to Passes, which he later marketed under specific captions and sold. Plaintiff further alleges that Passes itself hosted a banner featuring a sexually explicit photo of Plaintiff, which marketed CSAM involving Plaintiff. Plaintiff therefore seeks to hold Passes liable for harm allegedly arising out of its own creation of harmful content.

Passes claimed that Celestin and Ginoza were third parties, but “As alleged, Celestin was
not merely another third-party user of Passes; rather, he acted as an agent and employee of Passes.” Cite to Quinteros.

The court summarizes:

Section 230 immunity does not apply to Passes, a platform which has allegedly, through its agents, deliberately created, marketed, and sold illegal content, acting as an “information content provider” that uses its own “interactive computer service.”

In a footnote, the court adds regarding Guo: “Plaintiff’s allegation that Guo encouraged Plaintiff over the phone to post content, which supports Plaintiff’s claims for IIED and California Civil Code § 52.5, does not hold Guo accountable for Passes’ publishing activity.”

Doe v. X Corp., 2026 WL 772384 (N.D. Tex. Feb. 25, 2026)

“A third party copied commercial pornographic content from Plaintiff’s OnlyFans and studio-based productions and uploaded it to X without his consent, violating the OnlyFans terms and conditions and the studios’ licensing agreements.” He sued pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 6851(b)(1)(A), a private right of action for nonconsensual production of intimate visual imagery. Doe produced the porn consensually, but he claims the restrictions extended to nonconsensual distribution.

The court says X qualifies for Section 230. Doe responded that he owned the IP in the works, so the IP exception applies. The court says:

The [IP] exception applies only when the claims arise from a law directly implicating intellectual property rights, not merely when intellectual property is involved in the claim. And the statute under which Plaintiff sues—§ 6851—is not an intellectual property law. Rather, it is concerned with “whether the depicted individual consented to a specific disclosure of an intimate visual depiction—regardless who holds the copyright to the image.” Thus, § 6851 creates a privacy-based tort right of action, not an intellectual-property based one.

The boundary between privacy and IP laws remains amorphous–increasingly so with all of the concerns about “deepfakes,” “virtual replicas,” and other AI-related regulations that use privacy framing to create what look like sui generis IP rights. This could be a good student paper topic.

For more discussion of the IP exception to Section 230, see this article.

Teague v. Google, 2026 WL 746996 (D. S.D. March 17, 2026)

Plaintiff claims Google committed defamation based upon the fact that “people think I raped [redacted]. This case (sic) been dismissed in 2021 but it still show (sic) on Google and caused me to (sic) threaten and attacked a few times.” Plaintiff further claims his image is on Google and it is difficult to get a job because the rape charges still appear on Google.”…

Google is not a “publisher or speaker” under the CDA and therefore “cannot be liable under any state-law theory to the persons harmed by the allegedly defamatory material.”

Google is immune from suit for defamation claims arising out of other content providers’ posts on the internet.

The post Section 230’s Application to Account Terminations, CSAM, and More appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Snap, Inc. v. Eighth Judicial District, 2026 WL 501564 (Nev. Supreme Ct. Feb. 23, 2026)

Related blog post about a Nevada Supreme Court ruling involving TikTok. Nevada alleges Snap harms users by addicting them. The court seemed quite comfortable with results-driven reasoning. This opinion read like the kind of Internet Law final exam student answer that gets a B- or C+.

Personal jurisdiction

The court seemed to hew pretty closely to the (uncited) Briskin ruling:

According to the State, Snap enters into contracts with each Nevada user through its terms of service, receives consent to collect each user’s personal data, then packages such data when it sells advertisement space that can target specific cities in Nevada and/or Nevada residents. Based on Snap’s business model, it has a strong interest in keeping users on its app for long periods of time—thereby supporting the State’s theory that Snap is purposefully designed to addict its users….

Snap enters into contractual agreements with its Nevada users through its terms of service, creates “communities” for Nevada students to engage with each other, advertises in the forum state, and collects user data to generate ad revenue….

Snap’s collection of user data and advertisement sales in Nevada establishes a pervasive presence that sufficiently relates to the underlying litigation, aimed at punishing Snap for negligently creating an addictive platform aimed at boosting its ad revenue.

First Amendment

While Moody disallows liability for the exercise of editorial functions, Snap fails to demonstrate how the State’s complaint only highlights such editorial functions to support its theory that Snap’s app was negligently designed to cultivate addiction in its younger users….

The State disavows any intent to impose such age verification or parental functions by means of its complaint. In looking to the complaint and its structure, the State points to the age verification and parental controls that Snap currently has in order to provide context for how Snap has negligently designed its app to be harmful to young users, not an attempted restriction on free speech…

the complaint describes the harm children have suffered as a result of Snap’s app and showcases the knowledge Snap had about the harm it continues to inflict on its users. At this point in the litigation, it cannot be said that the State seeks to compel speech from Snap

The court’s age authentication sleight-of-hand is dirty. Nevada claims it’s not requiring age authentication, but that Snap implemented age authentication incorrectly. Is there really a difference? If the state can base a negligence claims on its disapproval of a service’s age authentication, the state controls the service’s implementation.

Section 230

Consistent with its similar TikTok ruling, the court says it won’t evaluate Section 230 feature-by-feature.

Huh? Of course Section 230 should apply feature-by-feature. The California federal and state court social media addiction rulings spent many dozens of pages doing just that. The court here prefers to speak in generalities rather than specifics because….? The only substantive justification I could see is that it permitted the court to categorically reject 230’s application when otherwise it would have partially applied. Dirty.

This leads to another dirty move by the court:

here it appears that the features highlighted in the State’s complaint provide context for its claims—that Snap misrepresented the harm its app can cause to its younger users. It does not appear that the State seeks to hold Snap liable for third-party content—thereby taking the underlying complaints outside of Section 230 immunity

The court reductively oversimplified/overgeneralized Nevada’s claims to reach this summary of the claims. This nove allows the court to sidestep Snap’s many arguments that show how third-party content is very much at issue in the case.

Hartford Casualty Insurance Co. v. Instagram LLC, 2026 WL 560349 (Del. Superior Ct. Feb. 27, 2026)

I know insurance coverage disputes sound uninteresting, but they can be pretty spicy. TL;DR: Meta tendered its two California social media addiction lawsuit defenses to its insurers. The court says the insurers have no duty to defend, so Meta will have to bear the tens (hundreds?) of millions of defense costs as well as any damages awards.

Facebook argues that the insurance companies (there are multiple insurance companies involved, and some are finger-pointing at each other) ganged up on Facebook and forced Facebook to take positions in this coverage dispute that conflict with its positions in the underlying litigation. The court is unperturbed:

the conduct alleged in the Social Media Litigation—even when viewed through the lens of negligence—describes deliberate acts rather than accidents under the policies. Because the Court’s determination regarding Meta’s intent is based strictly on the face of the underlying complaints, it does not “overlap” with the factual truth of the allegations to be litigated in California.

Substantively, the insurance policies cover an “occurrence,” which all parties agree means an “accident.” The court says an accident is “an unexpected, unforeseen, or undesigned happening or consequence from either a known or unknown cause.” But “[a]n accident does not occur when the insured performs a deliberate act unless some additional, unexpected, independent, and unforeseen happening occurs that produces the damage.”

The court says:

Because Meta’s platform design choices—as alleged—were voluntary business decisions aimed at increasing engagement, they fall squarely within this broad definition of deliberate conduct….

Meta concedes that the plaintiffs allege these choices were made to “maximize engagement.” It is therefore unassailable that the complaints allege that Meta’s conduct was a purposeful effort to operate and maximize its platforms.

Given the financial stakes and the ambiguities of the law, this ruling surely will be appealed.

Breathitt County School District v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 4:22-md-03047-YGR (N.D. Cal. Feb. 9, 2026)

In the federal MDL, the social media defendants moved for summary judgment on some of the school districts’ claims. It doesn’t work.

Among its many rulings, the court again rejects the Section 230 defense:

The Court’s MTD order already established that certain platform design choices—the Actionable Defects—are sufficiently independent from content to avoid Section 230. Here, Breathitt provides deposition, documentary, and expert opinion evidence that each defendant’s platforms contained Actionable Defects which engender compulsive use. Breathitt also offers evidence specific to the district, including expert opinion and individual testimony, describing how social media use affects students within the school environment. Finally, Breathitt proffers affidavit and survey evidence linking students’ social media use to hard costs and opportunity costs incurred by the district. This evidentiary showing, as further outlined below, creates a triable issue of fact as to each of the Actionable Defects. The issue of evidence regarding the barred features is largely one of admissibility under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, not a basis for summary judgment

The post Catching Up on Some Social Media Addiction Rulings appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

asserts that Google’s spam filter failed to block abusive, spoofed, and spam emails from reaching her Gmail account. She says that reading these emails caused her emotional distress, and although she does not allege that the emails ever reached anyone else but her, she contends that they somehow damaged her reputation and disrupted her “professional communications and ongoing federal litigation.”

She sued Google for negligence, emotional distress, and something she calls “platform harm.” Yes, this is a pro se/IFP lawsuit. Unsurprisingly, it fails (multiple ways).

Section 230. The court says:

All the plaintiff’s claims are fundamentally based on her assertion that the defendant allowed certain unwanted messages through Gmail’s spam filters. Because she seeks to hold the defendant liable for its decisions related to monitoring and screening of emails, her claims “fall squarely within the exercise of a publisher’s role” and are “therefore subject to Section 230’s broad immunity.” [cite to Ynfante v. Google.] Finally, the emails in question came from an information content provider distinct from the defendant. The plaintiff does not allege that the defendant is the creator or developer of any of these emails.

Dor is suing Gmail for doing too little spam filtering. The court responds that spam filtering is the exercise of editorial discretion. This is an implicit but emphatic rejection of the must-carry obligations baked into arguments that email should be regulated like common carriage.

Then again, you can see how spam filters can’t win with  plaintiffs. Dor thinks there is too little filtering. The RNC thought Gmail did too much filtering. Spam filters could manage their liability only if, like Goldilocks, they got it just right. Otherwise, someone on one side or the other would rip them to shreds in court if the law allowed them to do so.

Prima Facie Case

The court alternatively dismisses the case for failure of the prima facie elements. Once again, Section 230 reform would not change the outcome of this case.

Negligence: “there is no indication that the defendant had a “special relationship
of custody or control” with the plaintiff. In addition, her claimed harms—emotional distress, reputational damage, and disruption of her communications—are attenuated from what the defendant is claimed to have done here, such that a reasonable person would not anticipate that the claimed harms were likely to result.” To be fair, it’s entirely foreseeable that an email address will receive crap spam. A reasonable person, however, doesn’t read the spam or, if they do, believe it to be true.

Emotional distress: “the plaintiff’s complaint alleges that the defendant failed to filter out certain emails, and those emails were distressing when she read them. The foreseeability element of both the intentional and negligent forms of emotional distress is lacking, because the defendant could not have plausibly foreseen that she would receive these emails from unknown third parties, and that she would be severely emotionally distressed by receiving them.”

“Platform Harm” (which the court interprets as a defamation claim): “The plaintiff does not allege that the defendant published a defamatory statement to a third party. Based on her complaint, the only person to receive the emails was herself.”

Implications

I wasn’t sure why this lawsuit got filed. Was it because Dor actually read her spam emails and thought they meant something? If so, this legal dilemma might be simply fixed with a short tutorial on how to manage spam emails.

I remind younger readers that spam used to be one of the top 3 Internet Law issues around a quarter-century ago. See my 2004 essay on the topic. We almost never see spam-related lawsuits nowadays. I think this reflects how improved spam filtering has ameliorated the issue to the point where spam is a minor nuisance. Notice how if this lawsuit succeeded (which it never had a chance of doing), holding spam filters liable for what they missed would make it impossible to offer spam filters at all.

Case Citation: Dor v. Google LLC, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32957 (D. Conn. Feb. 13, 2026)

BONUS: Norton v. Turrentine, 2026 WL 687094 (N.D.Miss. March 11, 2026): “Given that Meta is an interactive service provider, the content at issue was provided by someone other than Meta, and the Plaintiff seeks to hold Meta liable for its purported exercise of a publisher’s traditional editorial functions (deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone, or alter content), it is clear Section 230 serves to bar the Plaintiff’s claims.”

Prior Blog Posts on Common Carriage

• Google Search Isn’t a Common Carrier–Richards v. Google
• Ninth Circuit Deletes RNC’s Lawsuit Over Gmail’s Spam Filter–RNC v. Google
• Google Search Isn’t a “Common Carrier” (DUH)–Ohio v. Google
• Court Blows Up Gmail’s Section 230 Protection, But Allegations of Biased Spam Filtering Still Fail–Republican National Committee v. Google
• Statement on the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Moody v. NetChoice
• Section 230 Protects Gmail’s Spam Filter–RNC v. Google
• Is Google’s Search Engine a “Common Carrier”? (Seriously???)–Ohio ex rel Yost v. Google
• Big Ruling for Free Speech: Most of Florida’s Social Media Censorship Law (SB 7072) Remains Enjoined–NetChoice v. Attorney General
• Texas and Its Amici Try to Justify Censorship in Their NetChoice v. Paxton Fifth Circuit Briefs
• Court Enjoins Texas’ Attempt to Censor Social Media, and the Opinion Is a Major Development in Internet Law–NetChoice v. Paxton
• Anti-Zionist Loses Lawsuit Over Social Media Account Suspensions–Martillo v. Facebook
• Texas Enacts Social Media Censorship Law to Benefit Anti-Vaxxers & Spammers
• 31 Bogus Passages from Florida’s Defense of Its Censorship Law–NetChoice v. Moody
• Florida Hits a New Censorial Low in Internet Regulation (Comments on SB 7072)
• Deconstructing Justice Thomas’ Pro-Censorship Statement in Knight First Amendment v. Trump
• Facebook Defeats Lawsuit Over Alleged ‘Shadowbanning’–De Souza Millan v. Facebook
• Are Social Media Services “State Actors” or “Common Carriers”?

The post Section 230 Preempts Lawsuit Over Unwanted Gmail Spam–Dor v. Google appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Richards’ mission apparently includes becoming a serial plaintiff:

With respect to this lawsuit: Richards claims that Google downranked the SpirituallySmart website starting in 2009 due to Google’s alliances with the Vatican and the US government. The downranking allegedly cost him millions of potential readers and substantial revenue. Unsurprisingly, his must-carry lawsuit goes nowhere, similar to the dozens of other failed content removal cases.

First Amendment

“Acknowledging that Google is not a government entity, Richards’s complaint and opposition brief include lengthy discussions of the ways Google’s conduct transforms it into a state actor.”

With respect to entwinement, “the executive orders that Richards cites involve restrictions on the use of AI and the training of AI models in the federal government, not Google search results. Further, any Vatican-Google partnership or coordination does not suggest that Google is entwined with the United States government, but rather a foreign entity.”

With respect to the public function test, “There is no indication that the government delegated any function to Google, let alone a function that was traditionally and exclusively performed by the government.”

Common Carriage

Richards urges the court to find that Google is a common carrier by using Justice Thomas’s framework from his concurrence in Moody v. NetChoice…While the law may someday reflect the argument that Richards raises, the current state of the law does not establish that Google is a common carrier.

(Thanks, Justice Thomas, for the helpful commentary!)

The court cited Ohio v. Google and says Virginia’s common carriage law similarly only applies to “the transport of persons or commodities.”

Religious Freedom Restoration Act

“The section does not encompass actions between private parties or corporations, such as Google.”

Section 230

“Richards’s state law claims include tortious interference with business relations, civil conspiracy, fraudulent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment, defamation by implication, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, violation of the Virginia Consumer Protection Act, and violation of Viriginia’s misappropriation statute.”

These claims all fail due to Section 230:

Google’s decision to display Richards’s content on the first page of the search results or Google’s decision to suppress Richards’s content, even if true, would fall squarely within the protection of Section 230 as editorial decision-making.

Cite to Dowbenko v. Google.

The claims also failed on their prima facie elements. This is yet another situation where reforming 230 wouldn’t change the outcome.

This lawsuit also has a major statute of limitations problem, given that Google’s downranking allegedly occurred in 2009.

Case Citation: Richards v. Google LLC, 2026 WL 353617 (W.D. Va. Feb. 9, 2026)

Prior Blog Posts on Common Carriage

• Ninth Circuit Deletes RNC’s Lawsuit Over Gmail’s Spam Filter–RNC v. Google
• Google Search Isn’t a “Common Carrier” (DUH)–Ohio v. Google
• Court Blows Up Gmail’s Section 230 Protection, But Allegations of Biased Spam Filtering Still Fail–Republican National Committee v. Google
• Statement on the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Moody v. NetChoice
• Section 230 Protects Gmail’s Spam Filter–RNC v. Google
• Is Google’s Search Engine a “Common Carrier”? (Seriously???)–Ohio ex rel Yost v. Google
• Big Ruling for Free Speech: Most of Florida’s Social Media Censorship Law (SB 7072) Remains Enjoined–NetChoice v. Attorney General
• Texas and Its Amici Try to Justify Censorship in Their NetChoice v. Paxton Fifth Circuit Briefs
• Court Enjoins Texas’ Attempt to Censor Social Media, and the Opinion Is a Major Development in Internet Law–NetChoice v. Paxton
• Anti-Zionist Loses Lawsuit Over Social Media Account Suspensions–Martillo v. Facebook
• Texas Enacts Social Media Censorship Law to Benefit Anti-Vaxxers & Spammers
• 31 Bogus Passages from Florida’s Defense of Its Censorship Law–NetChoice v. Moody
• Florida Hits a New Censorial Low in Internet Regulation (Comments on SB 7072)
• Deconstructing Justice Thomas’ Pro-Censorship Statement in Knight First Amendment v. Trump
• Facebook Defeats Lawsuit Over Alleged ‘Shadowbanning’–De Souza Millan v. Facebook
• Are Social Media Services “State Actors” or “Common Carriers”?

The post Google Search Isn’t a Common Carrier–Richards v. Google appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Section 230 didn’t receive much attention when it was passed, but it has since emerged as one of Congress’ most important media laws ever. Section 230 helped trigger the Web 2.0 era–where people principally talk with each other online, rather than just having content broadcast at them one-way. By enabling that discourse and other new categories of human interaction, Section 230 has thus reshaped the Internet and, by extension, our economy, our government, and our society.

To commemorate Section 230’s 30th anniversary, this post considers Section 230’s past, present, and future.

* * *

Section 230’s Past

“Big Tech” Didn’t Lobby for Section 230. Google and Facebook didn’t exist in 1996; they emerged in the wake of Section 230’s passage. In 1996, the Internet industry was small, especially as compared to other media industries like cable or telephony. However, AOL played a key role in Section 230’s passage, as evidenced by the fact Section 230 uses statutory terms like “interactive computer service” and “information content provider” (a really terrible phrase) that mirror AOL’s idiosyncratic jargon.

The Internet Industry Didn’t Initially Celebrate Section 230’s Passage. I’m not aware of any fetes in 1996 that celebrated Section 230’s passage. That’s because Section 230 was overshadowed by another part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Communications Decency Act (CDA). The CDA imposed an unmanageable risk of criminal liability on Internet companies for user-generated content, so Internet executives were panicked that they might go to jail for the ordinary operation of their services. There was no time to get excited about Section 230’s long-term implications in the face of the immediate threat of criminal prosecution.

A week after the act’s passage, a district court enjoined the CDA, and the industry panic slightly abated. The industry relaxed a little more when the Supreme Court struck down the CDA as unconstitutional in 1997 (the Reno v. ACLU decision). However, that relief was short-lived because Congress quickly passed another law to criminalize user-generated content (the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, ultimately declared unconstitutional). So for years after Section 230’s passage, the industry was preoccupied by Congress’ UGC criminalization efforts.

Section 230’s Impact Wasn’t Immediately Clear. Section 230 includes some unusual and non-intuitive statutory language. As a result, the Internet industry wasn’t initially sure exactly what it said. Section 230’s potential scope only started to emerge after the district court ruling in Zeran v. AOL in March 1997. Then, after the Zeran v. AOL Fourth Circuit opinion in November 1997, it became clearer that Section 230 had reshaped the law of user-generated content. For more on the Zeran case, see this ebook.

Section 230 Left Open a Problematic “Copyright Hole.” Section 230 expressly excludes intellectual property claims based on third-party content. As a result, even after Section 230 passed, Internet services still faced potential secondary copyright liability with no statutory protection from Congress.

In particular, vicarious copyright infringement turns on a service’s “right and ability to control” the content on its servers, and plaintiffs can cite a service’s content moderation efforts–including those otherwise immunized by Section 230–as inculpatory evidence. In other words, Section 230 didn’t immediately legalize content moderation, because default copyright law still made those practices legally risky.

Two-plus years later, Congress partially plugged Section 230’s copyright hole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In contrast to Section 230’s unconditional immunity for UGC, the DMCA created a notice-and-takedown liability scheme for user-caused copyright infringement. However, it took years for court cases to confirm that standard content moderation efforts didn’t increase services’ copyright liability for user-generated content.

Due to its unusual drafting and the legal context surrounding it, Section 230 didn’t definitively resolve the legitimacy of user-generated content and content moderation efforts when it passed in 1996. That implication took several more years to emerge.

For more on Section 230’s past, see Prof. Jeff Kosseff’s book, The 26 Words That Created the Internet. See also the 15-year retrospective event we held at SCU in 2011.

* * *

Section 230’s Present

Section 230 Offers Critical Procedural Benefits. Critics, politicians, and the media often focus their fire on Section 230’s substantive scope, such as how it compares to the First Amendment and whether it strikes the right policy balances. However, much of Section 230’s “magic” is procedural, not substantive. Section 230 provides courts with a helpful way of quickly dismissing unmeritorious cases. This, in turn, reduces defendants’ costs and increases their confidence of winning in court; and this further emboldens services to optimize their editorial policies for their audiences, engage in content moderation to effectuate those policies, and legally defend individual items of user-generated content. Even if the First Amendment dictated all of the same substantive outcomes as Section 230 (it doesn’t), Section 230 provides greater procedural predictability to the parties and thus achieves superior outcomes.

Section 230 Affects a Lot of Court Cases. According to the Shepard’s citation service, Section 230 has been cited in over 1,700 cases. As this figure indicates, citations keep going up:

Section 230 Discourages Many Lawsuits From Ever Being Filed. Section 230 has largely extinguished the genre of lawsuits against Internet services for their individual content moderation decisions. Without Section 230, every content moderation decision might prompt a lawsuit, manufacturing millions of potential lawsuits every day.

Section 230’s Drafters Future-Proofed the Law. Section 230 critics often highlight its adoption during the Internet’s infancy, as if that’s proof the law is not appropriate for the modern mid-2020s Internet. In 2020, Sen. Wyden and former Rep. Christopher Cox, the authors of Section 230, responded:

[Critics] assert that Section 230 was conceived as a way to protect an infant industry, and that it was written with the antiquated internet of the 1990s in mind – not the robust, ubiquitous internet we know today. As authors of the statute, we particularly wish to put this urban legend to rest…our legislative aim was to recognize the sheer implausibility of requiring each website to monitor all of the user-created content that crossed its portal each day…

The march of technology and the profusion of e-commerce business models over the last two decades represent precisely the kind of progress that Congress in 1996 hoped would follow from Section 230’s protections for speech on the internet and for the websites that host it. The increase in user-created content in the years since then is both a desired result of the certainty the law provides, and further reason that the law is needed more than ever in today’s environment.

* * *

Section 230’s Future

[TL;DR: ]

Congress Has Begun Chipping Away at Section 230. Congress has made two crucial reductions in Section 230’s scope in the past decade. In 2018, in FOSTA, Congress amended Section 230 to exclude immunity for commercial sex promotions. Then, last year, Congress passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which apparently overrides Section 230 to establish a notice-and-takedown scheme for intimate visual depictions.

Congress Could Repeal Section 230 at Any Moment. No politically powerful constituencies still publicly support Section 230. If a floor vote for a Section 230 repeal bill were scheduled in the House or Senate, I expect the repeal would pass by overwhelming margins.

Courts Are Repealing Section 230 Without Any Help From Congress. In 2024, in Anderson v. TikTok, the Third Circuit functionally repealed Section 230 in its circuit. The court said that any service that qualifies for First Amendment protections (which all online content publishers do) simultaneously cannot qualify for Section 230.

Separately, throughout the country, plaintiffs are pushing courts to hold websites liable for how they design their services because (they argue) such design choices are outside of Section 230’s scope. This argument is extremely problematic. A service’s “design choices” are synonymous with a publisher’s editorial decisions about how to gather, organize, and disseminate content. These are the kind of activities the First Amendment ought to protect. Further, for social media services that principally republish third-party content, “negligent design” claims could impose liability for that content–exactly what Section 230 should prevent. So long as courts are open to lawsuits over “design choices” and don’t apply Section 230 to those claims, plaintiffs will erode Section 230’s legal protections.

The Internet’s Future is Dire, Regardless of Section 230’s Fate. Fueled by the techlash, especially panics about children’s online usage, regulators are passing a tsunami of laws to regulate every aspect of how online publishers gather, organize, and disseminate content. Many of these laws are unconstitutional and violate Section 230, but legislators pay little heed to such concerns. Even if courts strike down most of these laws, the surviving laws will reshape how the Internet works.

In particular, legislatures are enacting laws that require online publishers to age-authenticate their users. These laws will have dramatic and universally negative consequences for the Internet, including raising publisher costs, shrinking publishers’ audiences, rewarding incumbents over startups, and creating massive privacy and security risks.

For these reasons, you should not assume that the Internet in 5 or 10 years will bear any resemblance to what we love most about the Internet today–no matter what Congress does to Section 230.

* * *

About the Author: Prof. Eric Goldman is Associate Dean for Research and Co-Director of the Datta Center for High Tech Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He began practicing as an Internet lawyer, and teaching an Internet Law course, before Section 230 became law.

* * *

Want to read even more on Section 230? Check out some of my other articles on the topic:

• An Overview of the United States’ Section 230 Internet Immunity
• Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment
• Want to Kill Facebook and Google? Preserving Section 230 Is Your Best Hope
• Dear President Biden: You Should Save, Not Revoke, Section 230

* * *

Today is also the 30th anniversary of John Perry Barlow’s essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” his fever-dream response to the CDA’s passage. The opening paragraph is exquisite:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

This essay is a culturally significant artifact because it had a tremendous impact on the mid-1990s discussions about Internet exceptionalism–even though the essay was always misguided and naive and has aged poorly.

The post Reflections on Section 230’s Past, Present, and Future on Its 30th Anniversary appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

I’m not sure how the plaintiffs will navigate around the statute of limitation, but they filed a new complaint against Armslist in D.N.H. in 2023. They are now arguing that Armslist negligently designed its service (to try to get around the Section 230 defense that applied in Massachusetts). The D.N.H. court granted Armslist’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction in New Hampshire. The plaintiffs appealed to the First Circuit, which issued an inscrutable opinion that further clouds the rules of Internet jurisdiction.

* * *

To establish specific jurisdiction in the First Circuit, the plaintiffs must show (1) relatedness, (2) purposeful availment, and (3) reasonableness:

The relatedness prong requires that each claim “directly arise[] out of or relate[] to” the defendant’s contacts with the forum state. The purposeful-availment prong requires that those contacts “represent a purposeful availment of the privilege of conducting activities in” the forum state. The reasonableness prong requires that “the exercise of jurisdiction” over each claim be “ultimately reasonable.”

Sounds pretty straightforward. And yet…

The district court didn’t resolve relatedness. Instead, it held that Armslist didn’t purposefully avail itself in New Hampshire. To show purposeful availment, the plaintiffs highlighted three facts about Armslist:

(1) the design of Armslist.com, (2) the advertising revenue that Armslist generated from visitors to its website, and (3) the average of “16,000 listings per year for firearms for sale in New Hampshire” that were posted on Armslist.com from 2018 on.

With respect to the website design, the court says “the Stokingers need to do more than show that Armslist knew that its website had the capacity to facilitate firearm sales in New Hampshire…[even though] the defendant had reason to think that its website’s design would result in the website impacting those in the forum state.”

Armslist lets sellers identify their location, but the plaintiffs didn’t allege that the gun’s listing identified a New Hampshire location. The court says the plaintifffs might have been able to argue that [the website’s design + a NH location = purposeful availment], but they didn’t.

With respect to Armslist’s advertising revenue, the allegations only reference Armslist’s capacity to generate NH revenues, not that it actually did so. If the plaintiffs have the data, this seems fixable in an amended complaint?

The appeals court spends most of its time evaluating the listings data from 2018. Armslist’s gun sale occurred in 2015 and the shooting occurred in 2016, and those dates set the facts for personal jurisdiction. (Note: for me, parsing these facts 10-11 years later reinforces the statute of limitations problem). The court says that *if* the 2018 listings did relate to the 2015/2016 activities, then the purposeful availment requirement is satisfied “when it is considered alongside the allegations and evidence regarding the website’s design and generation of advertising revenue”:

The evidence of the “New Hampshire” listings supplies what is otherwise lacking — evidence that supportably shows that Armslist knew that “it was intentionally operating its website” for the purpose of facilitating firearm sales in New Hampshire. It supportably does so because it shows that, from 2018 on, thousands of people each year were accessing Armslist.com and seeking to sell their firearms in New Hampshire specifically. And so, based on this additional evidence concerning the volume of “New Hampshire” listings, we find that Armslist had reason to know not merely that its website was capable of being used to facilitate firearm sales in New Hampshire but that it was, in fact, being so used.

Additionally, we conclude that Armslist was not merely a passive bystander to the website being so used. It had “voluntarily” taken an affirmative step to increase the likelihood that a firearm being offered for sale in New Hampshire would be purchased in that same state. It had implemented its geographic-filtering mechanism to enable would-be buyers to find firearms being offered for sale in the state and thus make a deal there and not in some other place….the Stokingers’ evidence about the FAQ page on Armslist.com supportably shows that Armslist expressly advised would-be sellers to use the geographic label that matched where they, and the firearm that they were offering for sale, were “physically located.”…

the evidence of those listings does make a prima facie showing that Armslist knew that there were thousands of “New Hampshire” listings on its website each year, starting in 2018. And so, those listings, when considered alongside the features of the website’s design that the Stokingers highlight, make a prima facie case that Armslist intentionally facilitated the culmination of sales in New Hampshire as opposed to any other place that the sellers, if left wholly to their own devices, may have chosen to close the deal…

through the thousands of “New Hampshire” listings posted on Armslist.com, Armslist was directly profiting from the advertising that it permitted on the website. By including the geographic-filtering mechanism described above, “it could be inferred,” as the District Court found, that Armslist was thereby generating “at least some amount of . . . advertising revenue from the New Hampshire listings,” which were posted by sellers looking to transact with New Hampshire buyers.

Armslist argued that it deployed the exact same website functionality for every state. In a response that reminded me of Briskin, the court responds: “a defendant who deliberately targets its behavior toward one state does not cease doing so just because it also chooses to deliberately target its behavior toward other states.”

Armslist retorted that many e-commerce websites use geography-specific dropdown menus but aren’t subject to specific jurisdiction in every state so enumerated. The court replies that the combination of 16k listings in New Hampshire + ad revenue + website design = Armslist “was specifically intent on its website leading to forum-state activity…[and] Armslist knew that its website so served” New Hampshire residents.

While this analysis benefits plaintiffs, the court nevertheless casts doubt on their case. With respect to the relatedness requirement–unaddressed by the lower court–the appeals court says: “it is not evident how New Hampshire-based firearm listings posted on Armslist.com years after the sale of the weapon alleged to have been used to shoot Officer Stokinger could suffice to satisfy the relatedness requirement.”

The court denies jurisdictional discovery to the plaintiffs, so they won’t get any help with the facts from Armslist.

* * *

Internet jurisdiction decisions routinely make my head hurt. They often involve impossibly fine distinctions and, for some reason, seem to reduce the opinion-writing skills of judges. In that spirit, this opinion contains an untangleable spaghetti code of nested doctrinal loops and drafting imprecisions.

I could not easily overlook the obvious statute of limitations problem and as well as the court’s sidestep of the relatedness requirement. Both issues have a non-trivial likelihood of mooting this case despite the court’s detailed analysis. In particular, the court seems to recognize the hypothetical nature of its discussion. The court says that IF the 2018 listings were related to the case, then specific jurisdiction would be satisfied, but the court then continues that it is possible–even likely–that the 2018 listings are not related to the 2015-16 events, in which case none of the other analysis matters.

As with the Briskin case, I am baffled about applying the court’s analysis to other circumstances. Take, as an example, eBay. It lists sellers’ locations, gets ad revenues from sellers, and allows users to search for local pickup. Is the court saying that these facts establish purposeful availment in every jurisdiction where eBay enables local pickup? Why or why not?

To be fair, Armslist clearly was intentionally curating NH buyers and sellers to match with each other. Many online services make these geographical matches. Between Briskin and this case, perhaps the legal rule is that such geographically dependent functionality ALWAYS results in personal jurisdiction in every supported geography, even if the service is merely structuring the conversation for its users’ convenience rather than intentionally trying to “target” a geography. In other words, the notion of georaphic “targeting” in personal jurisdiction may not depend on the defendant’s intent about purposefully availing themselves of any one particular jurisdiction and instead is more like a purity test about the defendant’s geographic knowledge. Too much geographic knowledge about where activity is taking place, and the courts will infer “targeting” (fairly or not) and find specific jurisdiction everywhere.

I note that Meta has just requested SCOTUS cert in a Vermont social media addiction case, claiming that the Vermont Supreme improperly found it was subject to specific jurisdiction in Vermont. Facebook’s core doctrinal issues are very similar to the Armslist case. I doubt the Supreme Court will take Facebook’s case, but at some point the Supreme Court needs to give more guidance about the Internet jurisdiction rules.

Case Citation: Stokinger v. Armslist LLC, 2026 WL 310022 (1st Cir. Feb. 5, 2026)

Other Blog Posts on Armslist

• Facebook Defeats Armslist’s Account Termination Lawsuit–Armslist v. Facebook
• Armslist Defeats Lawsuits Over Illegal Gun Sales (Without Section 230’s Help)–Webber v. Armslist
• Armslist Loses Two Section 230 Rulings, But Still Defeats Both Lawsuits
• Armslist Wins Another Section 230 Ruling–Stokinger v. Armslist
• Wisconsin Supreme Court Fixes a Bad Section 230 Opinion—Daniel v. Armslist
• Wisconsin Appeals Court Blows Open Big Holes in Section 230–Daniel v. Armslist
• Online Marketplaces Facilitating Gun Sales Don’t Kill People. People Kill People
• Gun Classified Ads Website Isn’t Liable for Murder–Vesely v. Armslist

The post Another Confusing Internet Jurisdiction Opinion (This Time, from the 1st Circuit)–Stokinger v. Armslist appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

The court says TikTok is not a state actor:

Plaintiff has not shown that any specific actions TikTok took on its platforms were traceable to any actionable federal rule to censor certain viewpoints….

Plaintiff offers no plausible factual allegations that the federal government coerced TikTok to regulate specific speech or viewpoints. As previously explained, Plaintiff’s assertions regarding government oversight generally are insufficient to support the inference that the government pressured TikTok into taking any specific action with respect to speech critical to the government. All Plaintiff has alleged is that TikTok was aware of a generalized federal concern with “improper manipulation” by foreign influence and that TikTok took steps to address that concern….

He alleges TikTok agreed to government oversight over its algorithm and moderation systems and a White House Fact Sheet announcing TikTok would operate under “strict rules” ensuring its content was “free from improper manipulation.” But nothing in these allegations support a reasonable inference that an agreement was made to regulate certain viewpoints, despite Plaintiff’s speculation to the contrary

This outcome is hardly surprising, but notice its fragility. We don’t know all of the details of the TikTok divestment that Trump claims to have brokered. However, the federal government’s extensive involvement in many aspects of TikTok 2.0 could very well flip the court’s reasoning in this case. For example, if the buyer group intentionally turns TikTok’s algorithm into Trump evangelism (which appears to be one of the driving motivations of the group purportedly buying TikTok), TikTok will more closely resemble a government mouthpiece than a private publisher making independent editorial decisions.

There is a deep irony that Brooks claims TikTok became a US government actor because Congress banned TikTok for purportedly being a Chinese government actor. It’s a reminder that Congress didn’t oppose government control of TikTok; Congress just wanted to be the government that controlled it. Due to its gamesmanship, Congress apparently handed control of TikTok to an authoritarian who every day disregards Congress’ powers. Well done, Congress.

Case Citation: Brooks v. TikTok Inc., 2026 WL 127940 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 13, 2026). CourtListener page.

Selected Posts About State Action Claims

• Terminated User Loses Lawsuit Against Facebook–Hunt v. Meta
• Section 230 (Still) Applies to Contract Breach Claim–NJCCC v. McAleer
• More Account Termination Cases Fail in Court
• WeChat Defeats Account Termination Lawsuit–Sun v. WeChat
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Breaking Internet Law Faster Than I Can Blog It
• A Peek Into the Long Tail of Facebook’s Litigation Docket
• Jawboning Defendants Are 6-for-6 in the Ninth Circuit–Hart v. Facebook
• YouTube Still Isn’t a State Actor–Albertson v. Google
• Twitter Account Suspension Lawsuits Keep Failing–Hall v. Twitter
• Twitter Defeats Account Suspension Case–Craft v. Musk
• Government Submissions to a Trusted Flagger Program Aren’t Unconstitutional Jawboning–O’Handley v. Weber
• Facebook Defeats Lawsuit Over Account Suspension for a Voting Misinformation “Joke”–Hall v. Meta
• Prager’s Lawsuit Over Biased Content Moderation Decisively Fails Again (This Time, in State Court)–Prager v. YouTube
• The 5th Circuit Puts the 1st Amendment in a Blender & Whips Up a Terrible #MAGA Kool-Aid–NetChoice v. Paxton
• Facebook Defeats Jawboning Lawsuit Over COVID Misinformation Removal–Rogalinski v. Meta
• Another Account Suspension Case Yeeted–Rangel v. Dorsey
• Another Failed Lawsuit Over Trump’s Deplatforming–Rutenberg v. Twitter
• COVID Skeptic Loses Lawsuit Over Account Terminations–Hart v. Facebook
• Twitter Defeats Trump’s Deplatforming Lawsuit–Trump v. Twitter
• Account Suspension Lawsuit Against Twitter Survives Motion to Dismiss–Berenson v. Twitter
• Another Failed Lawsuit Over Facebook’s Content Removals–Brock v. Zuckerberg
• Section 230 Survives Yet Another Constitutional Challenge–Huber v. Biden
• Another Court Says Facebook Isn’t a State Actor–McWaters v. Houston
• Another Anti-Vaxxer Jawboning Lawsuit Fails–ICAN v. YouTube
• The First Amendment Protects Twitter’s Fact-Checking and Account Suspension Decisions–O’Handley v. Padilla
• One More Time: Facebook Isn’t a State Actor–Atkinson v. Facebook
• Two More Courts Tell Litigants That Social Media Services Aren’t State Actors
• Government Jawboning Doesn’t Turn Internet Services into State Actors–Doe v. Google
• Anti-Zionist Loses Lawsuit Over Social Media Account Suspensions–Martillo v. Facebook
• Court Nopes Another Lawsuit Over Facebook Suspensions–Orders v. Facebook
• Facebook Defeats Lawsuit By Publishers of Vaccine (Mis?)information–Children’s Health Defense v. Facebook
• Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging YouTube Engaged in Racially Biased Content Moderation–Newman v. Google
• Yet Another Court Says Facebook Isn’t a State Actor–Brock v. Zuckerberg
• YouTube (Again) Defeats Lawsuit Over Content Removal–Lewis v. Google
• When It Came to @RealDonaldTrump, Twitter Couldn’t Please Everyone–Rutenberg v. Twitter
• Another Must-Carry Lawsuit Against YouTube Fails–Daniels v Alphabet
• Newspaper Isn’t State Actor–Plotkin v. Astorian
• An Account Suspension Case Fails Again–Perez v. LinkedIn
• Are Social Media Services “State Actors” or “Common Carriers”?
• Google and Twitter Defeat Lawsuit Over Account Suspensions/Terminations–DeLima v. Google
• More Plaintiffs (and Lawyers) Need To Be Reminded That YouTube Isn’t a State Actor–Divino v. Google
• Facebook Isn’t a Constructive Public Trust–Cameron Atkinson v. Facebook
• Google and YouTube Aren’t “Censoring” Breitbart Comments–Belknap v. Alphabet
• LinkedIn Isn’t a State Actor–Perez v. LinkedIn
• Section 230 Preempts Another Facebook Account Termination Case–Zimmerman v. Facebook
• Section 230 Ends Demonetized YouTuber’s Lawsuit–Lewis v. Google
• Court Rejects Another Lawsuit Alleging that Internet Companies Suppress Conservative Views–Freedom Watch v. Google
• Another Suspended Twitter User Loses in Court–Wilson v. Twitter
• First Voters Reject Tulsi Gabbard, Then a Judge Does–Gabbard v. Google
• YouTube Isn’t a State Actor (DUH)–PragerU v. Google
• Facebook Still Isn’t Obligated to Publish Russian Troll Content–FAN v. Facebook
• Vimeo Defeats Lawsuit for Terminating Account That Posted Conversion Therapy Videos–Domen v. Vimeo
• Russia Fucked With American Democracy, But It Can’t Fuck With Section 230–Federal Agency of News v. Facebook
• Private Publishers Aren’t State Actors–Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck
• Your Periodic Reminder That Facebook Isn’t a State Actor–Williby v. Zuckerberg
• Section 230 Protects Facebook’s Account and Content Restriction Decisions–Ebeid v. Facebook
• Court Tosses Antitrust Claims That Internet Giants Are Biased Against Conservatives–Freedom Watch v. Google
• Twitter Isn’t a Shopping Mall for First Amendment Purposes (Duh)–Johnson v. Twitter
• YouTube Isn’t a Company Town (Duh)–Prager University v. Google
• Facebook Defeats Lawsuit By User Suspended Over ‘Bowling Green Massacre’–Shulman v. Facebook
• Yelp, Twitter and Facebook Aren’t State Actors–Quigley v. Yelp
• Facebook Not Liable for Account Termination–Young v. Facebook
• Online Game Network Isn’t Company Town–Estavillo v. Sony
• Third Circuit Says Google Isn’t State Actor–Jayne v. Google Founders
• Ask.com Not Liable for Search Results or Indexing Decisions–Murawski v. Pataki
• Search Engines Defeat “Must-Carry” Lawsuit–Langdon v. Google
• KinderStart Lawsuit Dismissed (With Leave to Amend)
• ICANN Not a State Actor

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sex trafficking victim <== Backpage advertiser/pimp <== Backpage <== Salesforce as backend service provider to Backpage

Normally, it should be pretty obvious that tertiary liability reaches too far. Salesforce had no direct interactions with the victim or the Backpage advertiser; and Salesforce is just one of dozens or hundreds of Backpage vendors who contributed to Backpage’s operations. But FOSTA cases bend these liability expectations. Courts must navigate Congress’ poor statutory drafting and apply the rules in cases involving horrific facts.

Tertiary liability online sounds like the kind of thing that Section 230 might preempt, and indeed Salesforce has defeated some FOSTA cases per Section 230. But not this case–Salesforce’s 230 defense went to the Seventh Circuit, which in 2023 issued a flawed ruling against Salesforce (sadly, I never blogged that ruling).

[My evergreen reminder: Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO and MAGA stan, has shit on Section 230 even though his company keeps invoking Section 230 in its litigation.]

After the Seventh Circuit ruling, the case returned to the district court on remand. Without any possibility of Section 230 immunity and with a stinging Seventh Circuit opinion looming over the case, Salesforce’s latest motion to dismiss goes about as well as you would expect.

FOSTA opinions are hyper-technical and confusing, so I’ll just highlight a few points that stood out to me:

• Salesforce and Backpage were in a “venture,” i.e., Salesforce was a vendor to Backpage’s business.
• The applicable standard for Salesforce’s scienter about Backpage’s criminality is negligence. Salesforce should have inferred that criminality from news reports and public discourse and from its private dialogue with Backpage about its customers requirements. “Plaintiffs’ allegations…show that Salesforce increasingly offered more tailored and proactive support as the relationship progressed. It is not necessary…for Plaintiffs to show that Salesforce engaged with any specific advertisements or moderation practices.”
• Salesforce “participated” in Backpage’s venture because “Salesforce regularly assisted Backpage in configuring, utilizing, and tailoring the software to its needs.” The court acknowledges that “providing limited technology support when a customer has a question about a specific feature would not constitute participation,” but here, “Plaintiffs provide detailed accounts of communications between Backpage and Salesforce showing how Salesforce facilitated the success of Backpage’s business….Salesforce was not at all indifferent to Backpage’s business–it spent the better part of five years actively invested in Backpage’s success.”
• Salesforce “knowingly benefited” from its participation in Backpage’s venture because it earned $1.4M as a service provider to Backpage.

Reading this opinion, it seems like many vendors could become liable for providing standard services to their customers. This puts vendors in the awkward position of having to do their own independent and underinformed risk assessment of the legality of their customers’ businesses, even in situations where courts have not established that legality.[FN] I’m not exactly sure how vendors can manage these evaluations to avoid unwanted legal exposures.

FN: Instead, in Backpage’s case, during the relevant time period, courts had consistently concluded that Backpage was not liable for third-party ads; the Seventh Circuit had chastized Cook County Sheriff Dart for attempting to dissuade Visa and Mastercard from providing payment services to Backpage; and even if Backpage had criminal aspects to its business, it also had legitimate aspects.

Case Citation: G.G. v. Salesforce.com, Inc., 2026 WL 45021 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 7, 2026)

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