Social Media Services Aren’t Liable for Buffalo Mass-Shooting–Patterson v. Meta
The New York state intermediate appeals court has issued a significant ruling dismissing four lawsuits that sought to hold many social media services (Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Google, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Twitch, Amazon and 4Chan) liable for the 2022 Buffalo mass-shooting….
Rounding Up Three Recent Section 230 Decisions
I’m trying to clear my blogging queue that backlogged during my China trip. Here are three Section 230 decisions from the last few weeks. Geegieh v. Unknown Parties, 2025 WL 1769766 (D. Ariz. June 26, 2025) The plaintiff claims that…
Social Media Addiction Lawsuit Proceeds Against TikTok and Instagram–Nazario v. Bytedance
This case involves the deadly practice of “subway surfing.” The plaintiff in this case claims her son died doing subway surfing that he tried only because he was encouraged by TikTok and Instagram videos. The court largely rejects the social…
Facebook and Twitter Defeat Account Termination Lawsuit–Castronuova v. Meta
Per Wikipedia, Cara Castronuova is “an American champion boxer, a professional sports announcer, political activist and celebrity fitness trainer.” This topline summary understates her #MAGA bona fides. The Wikipedia entry also notes that she “was one of the organizers of…
YouTube Again Defeats FOSTA Lawsuit–In re YouTube Trafficking Litigation
[Note: my blogging hiatus is due to a trip to China. I will return to the US this weekend and presumably resume my regular blogging cadence then.] This is a confusing lawsuit that has been through several names, including “Sarah…
Reddit Defeats Lawsuit Over WallStreetBets Subreddit–Rogozinski v. Reddit
This is one of those oh-so-stupid hard-eyerolling lawsuits that I blog for coverage purposes, but I blog it joylessly and with annoyance at the wasted time. I previously summarized this case: Jaime Rogozinski, a/k/a “jartek,” created the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, which…
Section 230 (Still) Applies to Contract Breach Claim–NJCCC v. McAleer
This case involves four main players: Newsmatics, which runs the EIN Presswire service, a pay-to-play press release distribution service. Frankly Media, one of Newsmatics’ distribution partners. Hwang, who submitted press releases to Newsmatics claiming that an NJ state court was…
A Review of the NYT v. Microsoft AI-Copyright Ruling (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp., 2025 WL 1009179 (S.D.N.Y. April 4, 2025), might be the most important case pending on the legality of scraping public data to create training data sets to build…
A Takedown of the Take It Down Act
By guest blogger Prof. Jess Miers (with additional comments from Eric) Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the ‘Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and…
Amazon Isn’t Liable for Merchant’s Display of Bogus Contact Info–Hillman v. Amazon
Hillman says that an Amazon merchant, Cozy Castle Furniture, mistakenly displayed Hillman’s contact information on its page as if it were the merchant’s contact info. As a result, Hillman says she got hundreds of complaints per day about the furniture…