The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on August 10 that thousands of lawsuits alleging Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat deliberately designed their platforms to addict children can proceed to trial, rejecting the companies’ attempt to invoke Section 230 as a shield against litigation.
The decision clears the path for approximately 2,400 federal lawsuits and 3,300 state court cases to move forward simultaneously against the largest social media companies in the world.
The companies had argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from liability over user-posted content, should also shield them from allegations that they designed addictive product features.
The 9th Circuit disagreed on procedural grounds, ruling that the appeal came too early because the lower court’s decision was not yet final. During January oral arguments, one judge noted that if Congress had intended Section 230 to provide such broad immunity, it could have said so explicitly.
The court drew a critical distinction: Section 230 provides a defense to liability, not immunity from lawsuits altogether.
“A trial is how the public finds out what Meta knew about its products’ impact on children, when it knew it, and what it chose to do with that knowledge,” the attorneys said. “Meta has fought to keep that evidence from the public.”
The cases are centralized before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, and the plaintiffs include parents, school districts, municipalities, and 29 state attorneys general. They allege that social media companies intentionally addicted young users through algorithmic recommendation systems. Moreover, other features like infinite scroll, push notifications, and engagement-maximizing design choices also contribute to surging depression, anxiety, body-image disorders, and a broader mental health crisis among American youth.
The legal momentum against Meta specifically has been building through a devastating series of courtroom losses over the past five months. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in March for designing platforms that harm young people, awarding $6 million to a now-20-year-old woman who became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child.
In a separate March verdict, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding it misled consumers about platform safety and enabled child sexual exploitation. The judge in that case subsequently added $567 million in abatement funds for a total $942 million judgment with mandatory platform changes.
The financial exposure ahead dwarfs everything Meta has faced to date in this area of litigation. Four states, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties at an August trial in Oakland. That figure sits close to Meta’s entire market capitalization of approximately $1.5 trillion.
Meta called the amount “outlandish,” stating that “a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.” The states calculated the number by multiplying per-violation fines under state consumer protection law by the estimated number of affected teenage users.
The appeals court also denied Meta’s separate bid to postpone the Oakland trial beginning this Wednesday. It is where the 29 state attorneys general will argue that Meta illegally collected children’s data, designed platforms to keep young users hooked, and misled consumers about safety measures. A further 14 states have brought claims under their own laws, scheduled for a separate trial in February 2027.
Meta has denied all allegations across every case, arguing that “social media addiction” is not an established psychiatric condition. They also claim statements about its platforms not being addictive therefore cannot be false.
Both Meta and Google have said they will appeal the March verdicts. None of the tech giants have officially addressed the court proceedings.
