IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION
Issue
In *In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation*, Meta Platforms and Instagram argue that an opposing damages expert should be excluded at the Daubert stage because his "Bad Experience Violations" methodology impermissibly counts harms arising from third-party content—conduct Meta contends Section 230 immunizes—and because his core extrapolation projects an 11-day, largely non-U.S. internal survey across six years without any statistical validation. The case raises the non-obvious question of whether Section 230 immunity can operate not merely as a defense to liability at the pleading or summary judgment stage, but as a freestanding basis to exclude an expert's quantification methodology under FRE 702.
What Happened
Meta and Instagram filed this reply brief on April 24, 2026, in support of their pending motion to exclude or strike the expert opinions of Carl Saba, a damages witness offered by the California Attorney General and three co-plaintiff states in MDL No. 3047. The brief responds to the AGs' opposition and seeks full exclusion of four of Saba's opinions (Ops. 2–5) under FRE 702 and *Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals*. Meta argues that Saba's "Bad Experience Violations" count necessarily attributes liability to Meta for third-party user content, placing the methodology beyond the reach of any cognizable legal theory under Section 230. Meta separately contends that Saba's central empirical foundation—an 11-day internal company survey called BEEF, predominantly reflecting non-U.S. data—cannot reliably support a six-year, nationwide harm projection under *General Electric Co. v. Joiner*, and that the Ninth Circuit's 2025 decision in *Engilis v. Monsanto Co.* forecloses the AGs' argument that such deficiencies go only to weight. Finally, Meta argues that Saba's time-spent thresholds were set by counsel rather than derived through any independent expert methodology, and that his disgorgement figure lacks both a causal nexus to specific wrongdoing and a statutory basis under the applicable consumer protection laws.
Why It Matters
The Section 230 argument is the most doctrinally ambitious piece of this filing: if accepted, it would establish that Section 230 immunity can collapse the Daubert admissibility inquiry—barring an expert from quantifying harm attributable to third-party content even when the underlying claims have survived dismissal. That would mark a significant procedural extension of immunity doctrine well beyond its traditional deployment at the pleading stage, and courts in this MDL have already drawn lines that complicate Meta's position. The BEEF-survey extrapolation challenge is the brief's strongest technical argument, representing a clean application of *Joiner*'s analytical-leap standard to a fact pattern—counsel-selected, geographically limited, temporally narrow survey data projected across years—that is difficult to rehabilitate through rebuttal alone. More broadly, this filing is worth watching because the expert exclusion fight will shape what the jury-facing damages case looks like in one of the first state AG consumer protection trials to proceed in this MDL, and a successful Daubert challenge here could effectively cap the states' ability to quantify violations at scale.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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