Browse Cases

Yelp Inc. v. Paxton

Angelilli v. Activision Blizzard, Inc., 2025 WL 1181000

Issue: Whether § 230 bars claims that Activision's online gaming platform facilitated harassment and harmful conduct directed at plaintiff through features of its Call of Duty game and matchmaking system.

Why It Matters: Part of the emerging litigation testing the scope of § 230 in the online gaming context, where platform design choices about matchmaking, anonymity, and in-game communication systems intersect with severe harassment. Related to the companion decision in the same matter, 2025 WL 1184247.

Angelilli v. Activision Blizzard, Inc., 2025 WL 1184247

Issue: Whether § 230 bars related claims arising from Activision's alleged failure to implement effective anti-harassment systems and safety features in the Call of Duty online platform, following the companion decision in 2025 WL 1181000.

Why It Matters: Companion to 2025 WL 1181000, together comprising the district court's full § 230 analysis of platform liability in the online gaming context. The pair of decisions addresses a relatively underexplored area of § 230 doctrine — the application of the statute to gaming platforms — and may be influential in subsequent litigation involving harassment on online multiplayer platforms.

Fletcher v. Facebook, Inc.

Issue: Whether Facebook operates as a state actor subject to First Amendment constraints when terminating user access, either because it constitutes a public forum or because it acted under government coercion or direction.

Why It Matters: This complaint illustrates the continued assertion of public forum and state action theories against platforms post-Packingham, despite contrary controlling authority in Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck and Prager University v. Google establishing that private platforms are not state actors. The government coercion allegations invoke the framework from Murthy v. Missouri and Bantam Books, but the complaint's broad, conclusory assertions about government "coercion" and "direction" without specific factual allegations illustrate the demanding causation and traceability standards Murthy established for jawboning claims.

Rosenblum v. Passes, Inc.

Issue: Whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes Passes, Inc. from liability for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) where plaintiff alleges the platform's agents actively solicited a minor to join the platform and then marketed and distributed the resulting CSAM.

Why It Matters: This case presents a potentially significant challenge to Section 230's scope in CSAM cases by alleging that platform agents' active recruitment and marketing of a minor creator transforms the platform from a passive host into a content developer or co-creator. If the material contribution theory survives the motion to dismiss, it could narrow Section 230 immunity for platforms whose employees or agents allegedly facilitate the creation or distribution of illegal content, particularly involving minors—extending the "content developer" exception beyond algorithmic design to direct human agency and solicitation.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. v. De Moraes

Issue: Whether a Brazilian Supreme Court justice's orders requiring U.S.-based social media platforms to suspend user accounts and censor content accessible in the United States are enforceable under U.S. law, or whether they violate the First Amendment and conflict with the Communications Decency Act.

Why It Matters: This case presents a novel collision between foreign government content removal orders and U.S. platforms' First Amendment rights to resist compelled censorship. It could establish important precedent on whether U.S. courts will recognize foreign judicial orders as unconstitutional "jawboning" when they compel platforms to suppress lawful political speech accessible to American users, and may clarify the territorial limits of foreign content regulation authority over U.S.-based intermediaries.

Karam v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether Section 230 bars claims against Meta arising from the company's decision to ban or restrict plaintiff's Facebook account and its alleged failure to prevent other users from posting content about plaintiff.

Why It Matters: This decision reinforces the broad application of Section 230 immunity to platform account termination and content moderation decisions, extending publisher immunity not only to third-party content but also to the platform's own editorial decisions about which users may access its services. The ruling demonstrates courts' continued willingness to apply Section 230 at the motion to dismiss stage to bar claims challenging fundamental platform curation functions including account access decisions.

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Ken Paxton, Attorney General, State of Texas

Issue: Whether Texas HB18, a state law regulating social media platforms' content moderation and targeted advertising practices directed at minors, violates the First Amendment and is preempted by Section 230.

Why It Matters: This appeal presents a post-Moody test case for state regulation of social media platforms' treatment of minors and targeted advertising practices. The Fifth Circuit's resolution will clarify how Moody's framework for evaluating must-carry and content moderation mandates applies to age-based restrictions and commercial speech regulations, and whether Section 230 preempts state laws targeting platform design features and advertising practices rather than third-party content liability.

M.P. v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether § 230 bars claims that Meta's recommendation algorithms and design features facilitated the sexual exploitation of a minor by connecting the minor with an adult abuser on Instagram.

Why It Matters: An important Fourth Circuit decision on § 230 in the child sexual exploitation context, adding to the developing circuit-level body of law on whether design-defect theories and algorithm-based claims survive § 230 dismissal. The decision is significant for the wave of CSAM and child exploitation litigation against social media platforms pending in multiple circuits.

Patterson v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether New York state law claims against Meta arising from the platform's design and content recommendation features are preempted by § 230(e)(3) or otherwise barred as publisher-based liability.

Why It Matters: An important state-court application of § 230 preemption doctrine and the design-defect framework. The New York Appellate Division's analysis contributes to the growing body of state appellate authority on § 230 preemption and is significant for ongoing multi-district litigation against Meta in both state and federal courts.

Amy v. Apple Inc

Issue: In *Amy v. Apple Inc.*, Apple argues that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act categorically bars the plaintiffs' claims against it as an app store intermediary. The question is whether a freshly decided Ninth Circuit ruling on social media platform immunity—*Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*—extends to Apple's distinct role as an app store gatekeeper that distributes third-party applications rather than hosting user-generated content in the traditional sense. That factual difference is not trivial, because courts have not uniformly agreed that app stores qualify for the same Section 230 treatment as content-hosting platforms.

Why It Matters: Apple is signaling to the court that a brand-new Ninth Circuit decision supports dismissing this case under the federal internet immunity statute, but it is not explaining why—a gap that matters because *Doe 1 v. Meta* arose in a social media context and Apple operates as an app store, a meaningfully different kind of intermediary. Whether that distinction defeats the analogy is a genuinely open doctrinal question: courts have not consistently agreed that app stores qualify as interactive computer services entitled to publisher-function immunity, and no binding Ninth Circuit authority has cleanly resolved that issue. This filing is therefore less a dispositive move than a pressure point—it forces plaintiffs to either distinguish the new ruling or concede its application, and it flags an ongoing fault line in Section 230 doctrine over how far immunity extends beyond platforms that host user content to those that simply distribute access to third-party applications.

Stebbins v. Rumble Inc.

Issue: In *Stebbins v. Rumble Inc.*, plaintiff David Stebbins argues that a statement Rumble made in a related miscellaneous proceeding — acknowledging an editorial decision to permit anonymous posting — constitutes newly discovered evidence sufficient under FRCP 60(b)(2) to reopen the court's prior dismissal of Rumble as a defendant. The non-obvious dimension is whether a platform's litigation statement made to *resist* a third-party subpoena on First Amendment grounds can be repurposed as an affirmative admission of tortious editorial control, and whether such an admission could itself defeat § 230 immunity by recharacterizing a general anonymity policy as the platform's "own conduct" causally contributing to the alleged harm.

Why It Matters: This motion illustrates a strategy plaintiffs have repeatedly attempted with limited success: taking a platform's statement made in an unrelated legal context to protect its users and repackaging it as a confession of liability. The legal obstacle is twofold — courts have consistently treated decisions about anonymous posting as quintessential editorial functions protected by § 230, and statements made to assert a procedural or constitutional right are not equivalent to admissions of underlying tortious conduct. The motion also tests the outer boundary of the "platform's own conduct" exception established in cases like *Roommates.com*: whether a documented platform policy enabling anonymity could ever constitute material contribution to the *unlawfulness* of specific content, rather than merely to its delivery — a question that remains theoretically open but has yet to find a receptive court on analogous facts. More broadly, the filing is a useful marker of how the procedural vehicle of FRCP 60(b) is being used in pro se platform-liability litigation to challenge interlocutory § 230 dismissals, a recurring posture that existing doctrinal commentary has not yet systematically addressed.