• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 26, 2024

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Meta Platforms helped fuel the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

In a ruling issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California said the complaint, which was filed in 2021, fell outside the 2-year statute of limitations. The ruling was with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs can't revise their allegations and bring them again.

The decision stemmed from a class-action complaint brought by a refugee who fled Myanmar after her father was detained by the military in 2012. Proceeding anonymously, she alleged that Meta's algorithms spread anti-Rohingya sentiment by promoting extremist content, including hate speech about the Rohingya ethnic minority. A second anonymous plaintiff later joined the complaint.

The lawsuit came around three years after a Facebook-commissioned report concluded the company didn't do enough to prevent people from using the platform to incite violence in Myanmar.

The complaint included a claim that Facebook should be liable for introducing a defective product -- meaning that its social networking service and the algorithms that recommend content -- into the marketplace. The complaint also claims Facebook acted negligently.

Meta argued the case should be dismissed at an early stage for numerous reasons, including that the plaintiffs waited too long to sue.

The company also argued that the allegations, even if proven true, wouldn't show how Facebook actions by the Myanmar military. Additionally, Meta said the claims are precluded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects web companies from lawsuits over material created by users.

Rogers' decided the case solely on the ground that the plaintiffs waited too long to sue.

“Meta’s purported role in the Rohingya genocide was publicly available beginning at least as of 2018,” she wrote. “Plaintiffs arguably should have been able to identify, through reasonable diligence, Meta’s potential nexus with their injuries by at least 2018.”