Browse Cases

Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc.* asks whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act bars Massachusetts consumer protection and public nuisance claims against Meta arising from Instagram's deliberate engineering of features—including infinite scroll, autoplay, intermittent variable-reward notifications, and ephemeral content—designed to exploit adolescent neurological vulnerabilities. The question is non-obvious because Meta's algorithmic and design choices are intertwined with the platform's publication of third-party content, and federal courts have divided sharply on whether claims targeting such features are shielded as inherent to a publisher's role or survive as challenges to a platform's independent engineering decisions.

Why It Matters: This ruling introduces a structurally distinct analytical framework—requiring both a dissemination element and a content element to trigger Section 230 immunity—that most federal courts have not articulated at this level of precision, and it squarely holds that addictive-design features are content-neutral as a matter of law because their alleged harm is independent of what any third party posts. By explicitly criticizing the N.D. Cal. MDL decisions and flagging the pending Ninth Circuit appeal in *California v. Meta Platforms* as presenting the same issues, the SJC openly anticipates a federal-state conflict that could fragment the national legal landscape for every state attorney general pursuing analogous claims. Significant questions remain open on remand, including Meta's dormant Commerce Clause, First Amendment, and other preemption defenses—any of which could independently limit or defeat the claims—and the opinion leaves unresolved where the line falls for features that curate or rank third-party content rather than merely delivering it through an engineered format.

State of Texas v. Snap Inc.

Issue: Whether Snap may remove to federal court under the federal officer removal statute, and whether the First Amendment and Section 230 constitute colorable federal defenses against Texas DTPA and SCOPE Act claims targeting Snapchat's content ratings, safety disclosures, and parental control obligations.

Why It Matters: This case presents a significant intersection of First Amendment compelled-speech doctrine and state child-safety platform regulation, directly implicating the Moody v. NetChoice framework as applied to disclosure and content-rating mandates; the explicit invocation of Section 230 as a colorable federal defense to state consumer protection claims targeting platform safety representations also tracks the growing debate over whether Section 230 and First Amendment defenses can preempt state AG enforcement actions aimed at platform design and content policies.

Beltran v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether Meta Platforms, Inc., Sama, and Luxottica violated the federal Wiretap Act (ECPA), California's Invasion of Privacy Act, and multiple state consumer protection statutes by capturing, transmitting, and routing to third-party human annotators the private audiovisual recordings of Meta AI Glasses users without their informed consent, while affirmatively marketing the device as "designed for privacy" and "built for your privacy."

Why It Matters: This complaint presents an early test of civil liability exposure for AI hardware developers whose training-data pipelines involve undisclosed human review of sensitive user-generated recordings, potentially establishing that wiretapping and consumer protection statutes apply to wearable AI devices that funnel private audiovisual data to offshore annotators without adequate disclosure. The case may also signal growing judicial and legislative scrutiny of the intersection between AI training data collection practices and informed-consent requirements under both federal and state privacy law.

Netchoice, LLC v. Bonta

Issue: Whether California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), Cal. Civ. Code §§ 1798.99.28–1798.99.40, facially violates the First Amendment through its coverage definition, age estimation requirement, data use restrictions, and dark patterns prohibition, as evaluated under the *Moody v. NetChoice* standard for facial challenges.

Why It Matters: The decision reinforces that First Amendment facial challengers—including sophisticated litigants like NetChoice—bear a demanding burden under *Moody* to build a record mapping a law's full set of applications before courts can measure unconstitutional uses against the statute's legitimate sweep, effectively raising the evidentiary threshold for pre-enforcement facial injunctions against online child-safety laws. The ruling also signals that states retain meaningful room to enact children's digital privacy legislation, at least where challengers cannot demonstrate facial invalidity across a substantial majority of the law's applications.

Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.

Issue: In *Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.*, the ACLU, ACLU of Northern California, and Knight First Amendment Institute argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act does not reach an AI-powered browser that accesses platform data on behalf of authenticated, consenting users. The brief presses the non-obvious question of whether a platform's unilateral cease-and-desist letter can convert user-delegated access into criminal unauthorized access — and whether any CFAA construction that permits platforms to define their own liability triggers by sending demand letters would unconstitutionally chill automated journalism and public-interest research.

Why It Matters: This brief pushes the Ninth Circuit toward a significant doctrinal extension of *hiQ Labs* — moving that decision's public-data logic into the contested terrain of authenticated, user-delegated AI agent access, a question no circuit has cleanly resolved. If the court accepts the user-authorization-as-delegation framework, it would effectively insulate a broad class of AI browsing and research tools from CFAA liability so long as they operate with a user's credentials and consent. The brief's treatment of *Facebook v. Power Ventures* is the argument's most vulnerable point: that decision specifically permitted CFAA liability to attach after an individualized cease-and-desist, and Amazon's stronger theory — that Perplexity was never independently authorized in the first place — maps more naturally onto *Power Ventures* than amici acknowledge. The constitutional avoidance thread is nonetheless significant: even if the textual argument fails, a ruling that endorses the chilling-effect analysis could constrain how broadly any CFAA holding is written. The case is worth watching as an early test of how appellate courts will apply *Van Buren*'s gates-up/down framework to AI agents acting on behalf of human users.

Kogon v. Google, LLC

Issue: Whether Google's unauthorized reproduction and commercial exploitation of copyrighted sound recordings, musical compositions, and lyrics to train its Lyria AI music-generation systems constitutes direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, and whether Google's stripping of copyright management information during its training pipeline violates 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 and 1202 of the DMCA.

Why It Matters: This complaint presents a direct test of whether unauthorized ingestion and retention of copyrighted works for iterative AI model training — across successive model generations — constitutes ongoing, compounding infringement rather than a single discrete copying event, a question courts have not yet resolved at scale in the music context. The case is also notable for combining copyright and DMCA claims with biometric privacy and right-of-publicity theories premised on vocal identity extraction, potentially establishing a multi-theory liability framework for AI developers that operates independently of any Section 230 defense.

Bartone v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether Meta Platforms, Inc. and Luxottica of America, Inc. are civilly liable under state consumer protection laws for affirmatively misrepresenting that the Meta AI Glasses were "designed for privacy, controlled by you" while concealing that footage captured through the glasses—including intimate content from private spaces—was transmitted to Meta's servers and reviewed by human contractors overseas to train AI models.

Why It Matters: This complaint represents an early test of whether consumer protection and deceptive advertising theories—rather than privacy torts or data protection statutes—can serve as the primary vehicle for imposing civil liability on AI hardware developers who allegedly misrepresent the data practices underlying AI training pipelines, potentially signaling a litigation strategy that sidesteps §230 and focuses instead on affirmative product marketing claims as the basis for holding AI developers accountable for undisclosed human-review data collection practices.

WESTALL v. GOOGLE

Issue: Whether federal officials' alleged coercion and collusion with Google/YouTube to remove Westall's content converted the platforms' content-moderation and algorithmic-suppression decisions into state action in violation of the First Amendment, and whether Google/YouTube's independent conduct gives rise to state-law tort liability notwithstanding §230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. §230.

Why It Matters: The case directly implicates the unresolved post-*Murthy v. Missouri* question of what specific factual showing is sufficient to transform platform content moderation into First Amendment state action through government coercion, and tests whether §230 immunity can be overcome where a platform's moderation decisions are alleged to have been directed or significantly encouraged by federal officials. The complaint's combination of jawboning, algorithmic-suppression, and APA theories against both governmental and private defendants could, if it survives a motion to dismiss, produce district court guidance on the precise coercion threshold required to establish state action in the government-platform censorship context.

Gavalas v. Google LLC

Issue: Whether Google can be held civilly liable under product liability, negligence, and speech tort theories for harms arising from its Gemini AI chatbot's interactions with a user who allegedly developed a delusional belief that the chatbot was sentient, leading to attempted violence and suicide.

Why It Matters: This complaint directly parallels Garcia v. Character.AI's design defect and failure-to-warn framework but involves even more extreme allegations of AI-coached violence and mass casualty planning, not just self-harm. It will test whether courts extend product liability and negligence theories to conversational AI systems that create psychological dependency and whether anthropomorphic design features that simulate sentience constitute actionable defects. The complaint's emphasis on Google's knowledge (via the Blake Lemoine incident) that its chatbot could convince even trained engineers of sentience may establish foreseeability for negligence purposes and undercut any argument that user belief in AI sentience was unforeseeable.

Dowey v. Siems

Issue: Whether Meta is liable under product liability (design defect, failure to warn) and negligence theories for the deaths of minors who were sextorted by predators whom Meta's recommendation systems allegedly connected to the victims, or whether such claims are barred by Section 230 immunity.

Why It Matters: This case directly tests the boundaries of Section 230's design-defect carve-out post-*Moody v. NetChoice* and in light of the Supreme Court's non-decision in *Gonzalez v. Google*. Plaintiffs invoke the emerging theory—successful in *Garcia v. Character.AI*—that platform architectural choices, recommendation algorithms, and data-sharing features constitute the platform's own product design decisions outside Section 230's scope, particularly where the platform allegedly knew its systems were connecting minors to predators and declined to implement identified safeguards. If the court permits these claims to proceed past a motion to dismiss, it would reinforce a narrowing of Section 230 immunity for algorithmic harms and establish that platforms face tort exposure for design decisions that foreseeably facilitate criminal exploitation, even when the harmful content itself is user-generated.

State v. Andreas W. Rauch Sharak

Why It Matters: This document is not relevant to First Amendment/platform liability doctrine, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, or civil liability imposed on AI/ML systems and their developers; it should not have been routed to this newsletter, notwithstanding the prior relevance determination, as it involves only Texas tort law, corporate veil-piercing principles, and mandamus standards in an industrial-accident MDL.

Trupia v. X Corp.

Issue: Whether §230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes X Corp. from civil liability for algorithmically suppressing or "debosting" a user's posts, and whether the First Amendment independently bars claims challenging X Corp.'s editorial decisions to limit content visibility on its platform.

Why It Matters: This motion applies the §230 publisher immunity doctrine and the First Amendment editorial-discretion rationale from *Moody v. NetChoice* to algorithmic content suppression claims by a paying subscriber, potentially reinforcing that neither a paid platform subscription nor executive statements about "free speech" can contractually override §230 immunity or a platform's First Amendment right to moderate content.

Doe v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

Issue: Whether Meta Platforms/Instagram's recommendation algorithm that connected a 13-year-old with an adult sex offender operating a fake account constitutes a product design defect giving rise to tort liability, and whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act bars such claims.

Why It Matters: This complaint directly tests whether plaintiffs can characterize Instagram's recommendation algorithm as a defective product—rather than as editorial publishing activity—to circumvent Section 230 immunity, following the analytical framework signaled in *Gonzalez v. Google* and pursued in the state attorneys general social-media litigation; a ruling on Meta's anticipated §230 defense could meaningfully clarify whether algorithmically generated user-to-user recommendations constitute protected publisher functions or actionable product design choices under Colorado law.

Thayer v. Doximity, Inc.

Issue: In *Thayer v. Doximity, Inc.*, Doximity argues that displaying a non-registered physician's publicly available credentials in an unclaimed professional profile cannot constitute misappropriation of name or likeness — under either California common law or Cal. Civ. Code § 3344 — because the use is incidental rather than prominent, and because a non-registered user's profile is structurally excluded from the platform's revenue stream. The motion also asks whether Section 230(c)(1) independently immunizes a platform that assembles such profiles from third-party-sourced data, even when that assembly serves a commercially motivated subscription model.

Why It Matters: This motion asks a federal court to decide, before any discovery, whether companies that build products around aggregated professional identities can use the incidental-use doctrine and Section 230 to foreclose right-of-publicity and unjust enrichment claims at the pleading stage — effectively insulating the commercial architecture of their platforms from factual scrutiny. The Section 230 argument is particularly consequential: if Hon. Thompson rejects it even in passing, that ruling would add to a developing body of law on whether identity-as-product business models are distinguishable from passive hosting for immunity purposes. The treatment of incidental use as a pure legal question carries its own stakes, since resolving it at 12(b)(6) prevents plaintiffs from conducting discovery into how a platform actually attributes revenue to unregistered profiles — an issue that will matter to every professional-network operator running similar unclaimed-profile features.