IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION
Issue
Whether §230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment require exclusion, under FRE 403, of evidence concerning third-party content and protected publishing features (including recommendation algorithms, autoplay, notifications, and Snap Streaks) that plaintiff seeks to admit at trial to support failure-to-warn and product-defect claims against social media platforms for alleged adolescent addiction injuries.
What Happened
In this MDL bellwether trial (Breathitt County Board of Education v. Meta et al.), defendants Snap, Meta, YouTube/Google, TikTok, and related entities filed a motion in limine seeking to exclude evidence of third-party content and §230-protected platform features; this document is defendants' reply brief in support of that motion, filed March 11, 2026, ahead of a March 18 hearing. Defendants argue that plaintiff's failure-to-warn theory impermissibly attempts to premise liability on protected publishing functions, contrary to the Ninth Circuit's holdings in *Doe v. Grindr* (9th Cir. 2025) and *Estate of Bride v. Yolo Technologies* (9th Cir. 2024), which require that any actionable harm be "independent of the site's publishing function." Defendants further contend that plaintiff's claimed "actionable features" rationale for admitting the challenged evidence is pretextual, and that the evidence presents a serious risk of unfair prejudice under FRE 403 because a jury would likely draw a direct causal inference from protected conduct rather than from any non-protected design defect.
Why It Matters
This reply brief illustrates how the §230 immunity question is migrating from the pleadings and summary judgment stages into trial-management rulings, testing whether the court's prior "feature-by-feature" liability framework can be operationalized as an evidentiary filter; the outcome could establish a replicable in limine standard for separating protected editorial/publishing conduct from actionable product-design claims in platform-liability litigation.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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