Massachusetts v. Meta

Question Presented

Whether Section 230 shields Meta from Massachusetts’ lawsuit alleging that Meta designed and used addictive features on its platforms to exploit children’s psychological vulnerabilities and falsely represented to the public that its platforms’ features were not addictive and that Meta prioritized youth health and safety.

Background

As Massachusetts’ complaint alleges, for years Meta and other social media giants have designed their products to maximize engagement, manipulating users into spending more time on their platforms than they would otherwise choose to – even when doing so is harmful to users’ health and wellbeing. Despite this, Meta has repeatedly represented to the public that its platforms are not designed to be addictive, and that Meta prioritizes user health and safety, especially the wellbeing of minor users who both spend the most time on social media and are most vulnerable to its harms.

The Case

In 2023, the Massachusetts Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that its addictive design practices violated Massachusetts’ unfair and deceptive trade laws and caused a public nuisance. The complaint also alleged that Meta misrepresented its products’ safety to the public. This action mirrors that of a many other state attorneys general who have brought similar claims in recent years under their own states’ laws. The Massachusetts Attorney General also filed a similar claim against TikTok in 2024.

Meta sought to dismiss Massachusetts’ suit, arguing that Section 230 immunized it from liability. A superior court judge in Suffolk County rejected Meta’s arguments and allowed the case to proceed, issuing an opinion with an excellent Section 230 analysis.

Meta appealed the superior court’s decision to Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court.

EPIC’s Brief

EPIC submitted a brief on behalf of itself, Common Sense Media, Cybersecurity for Democracy, the Tech Justice Law Project, and thirteen legal scholars with expertise in digital rights, Section 230, and the First Amendment.

In a similar vein to EPIC’s amicus brief before the Ninth Circuit earlier this year in California v. Meta, the brief explains that the purpose of Section 230, which prohibits internet companies from being treated as the “publisher” of user-generated content, was to prevent the “moderator’s dilemma.” The moderator’s dilemma is an undesirable legal situation in which internet companies would be forced to choose between removing all potentially tortious content (resulting in over-censorious moderation), not moderating at all, or stopping hosting user-generated content entirely.

The brief demonstrates that the addictive design claims do not put Meta into the moderator’s dilemma as the company could choose alternative designs that mitigate the harm to kids without touching user content. As a result, Section 230 does not apply.

The brief further explains that denying Section 230 protections to Meta in this case would not “break the internet.” On the contrary, it would improve the quality of social media platforms for consumers by incentivizing more pro-social platform design by ensuring greater accountability when companies design their platforms in harmful ways.

In Part II, the brief argues that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Moody v. NetChoice does not present a First Amendment bar to Massachusetts’ action either. The Court in Moody carefully limited the scope of platform activities recognized as exercises of protected editorial discretion and, in the process, pointedly refused to adopt NetChoice’s desired rule that all decisions companies make to select and display content online are expressive. In fact, the Court majority (and various concurring opinions) explicitly questioned whether selecting content based on user behavior or machine learning algorithms – as is the case with engagement-maximizing algorithmic design – is expressive.

In essence, the brief spelled out that, unless the conduct at issue in the case is a company’s enforcement of its content moderation rules, companies cannot use Moody to argue that their conduct is expressive. Neither Section 230 nor the First Amendment bar Massachusetts’ action, focused on Meta’s product design decisions and misrepresentations to the public.

Update

Court’s opinion issued April 10, 2026