• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 18, 2024

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell can proceed with a lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms of designing Instagram to hook young users and then serving them with potentially harmful content, a state court judge ruled Friday.

The ruling came in a lawsuit dating to October 2023, when Campbell alleged that Meta designed Instagram with supposedly addictive features such as “incessant” notifications and automatically playing videos.

She also alleged that Meta deceived the public by claiming that safety was a priority, but recommending content that violated its standards.

“Meta's 'community standards' prohibit many forms of harmful posts including certain content related to suicide, self-injury, eating disorders, or harassment,” the complaint alleged. “Despite this prohibition, Meta knows its content recommendation algorithms routinely present young users with the types of harmful posts or accounts that are either prohibited or borderline.”

The complaint included allegations that Meta violated Massachusetts' consumer protection laws.

The allegations in Massachusetts are similar to ones raised by dozens of other attorneys general who are pursuing a separate lawsuit against Meta in federal court in California.

Meta urged Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp to throw out the Massachusetts complaint at an early stage. Among other arguments, Meta said the claims were foreclosed by both Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act broadly immunizes web services from liability over material posted by users, and has been interpreted by many judges as also protecting companies from lawsuits over editorial decisions about how to display that material. The First Amendment separately protects web companies' editorial decisions about curation.

“The First Amendment bars claims that Meta failed to adequately enforce its content policies, should have had more restrictive policies, or employed algorithms that displayed allegedly harmful content to users,” the company argued in papers filed earlier this year.

Meta added that U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in a federal class-action brought by teens and their families that Section 230 and the First Amendment protected Meta from claims regarding many design features -- including algorithmic recommendations and automatically playing videos.

Krupp sided against Meta, suggesting that a design feature such as automatically playing videos could be actionable even if the videos' content was not.

“The Commonwealth alleges that Instagram's features in and of themselves, regardless of their associated content, cause its young users to become addicted to the platform,” he wrote.

He added that if the state were to prove its case, “Meta would not have to alter or monitor Instagram's third-party content” because “the gravamen of the allegations have nothing to do with the type of content editing, monitoring or removal that could trigger immunity under Section 230.”

A Meta spokesperson said the company disagrees with the ruling.

“We’ve developed numerous tools to support parents and teens, and we recently announced that we’re significantly changing the Instagram experience for tens of millions of teens with new Teen Accounts, a protected experience for teens that automatically limits who can contact them and the content they see,” the spokesperson said.