• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 15, 2022

Siding with Meta Platforms, a federal judge has dismissed a class-action complaint alleging that the company helped fuel the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

The ruling, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, allows the plaintiff to beef up the allegations in the complaint and bring them again.

The decision grew out of a lawsuit brought last year 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.

“The resulting Facebook-fueled anti-Rohingya sentiment motivated and enabled the military government of Myanmar to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” she alleged in a lawsuit brought last year. “To justify and strengthen its hold on power, the government cast, by and through Facebook, the Rohingya as foreign invaders from which the military was protecting the Burmese people.”

The lawsuit came several years after a Facebook-commissioned report concluded that the company did not take sufficient steps to prevent the platform from being used to incite offline violence in Myanmar.

One of the complaint's claims is 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 that the lawsuit should be dismissed at an early stage for numerous reasons, including that the allegations, even if taken as true, wouldn't show how Facebook caused actions by the Myanmar military.

The complaint “contains no facts sufficient to establish the legally required causal connection between the use of Facebook by members of the Myanmar military and the military actions in 2012 that that harmed plaintiff’s father and ... caused her to flee,” Facebook wrote in papers filed with Gonzalez Rogers in March.

The company also said the claims are barred by a two-year statute of limitations.

In addition, 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.

Gonzalez Rogers sided with Meta on Thursday, although without ruling specifically on whether Section 230 applies.

“Given the deficiencies identified with the complaint, the court is not addressing every issued raised in the papers,” she wrote, adding that she was not deciding “at this juncture” whether Section 230 protects Facebook.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide by next year whether Section 230 protects websites that are accused of algorithmically promoting user-generated content. 

The refugee's lawyer, Jay Edelson, says he plans to bring an amended complaint.

“We believe the court gave us a clear roadmap to amending our complaint, which will allow us to get into discovery quickly and ultimately take this case to trial,” he says.