Massachusetts Becomes First State High Court to Rule Section 230 Does Not Shield Social Media Design Choices
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled April 10 that Section 230 does not bar Attorney General Andrea Campbell's lawsuit against Meta over Instagram's addictive design, the first such ruling by any state's highest court.
Overview
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on April 10, 2026 that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not immunize Meta Platforms from claims that Instagram’s addictive design features harm children, allowing Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s consumer protection lawsuit to proceed past the motion-to-dismiss stage. The decision in Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc. — listed under docket SJC-13747 on Justia — is the first time any state’s highest court has considered whether the 1996 federal liability shield bars claims that platforms knowingly addicted young users, according to CNBC.
The ruling carves a narrow but significant exception into a statute that for nearly three decades has been the foundation of American internet law, and arrives as state attorneys general, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and Congress increasingly seek to hold platforms accountable for the engineered behavior of their products rather than for the speech those products carry.
What the Court Decided
The SJC opinion, authored by Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt, rejected Meta’s argument that Section 230(c)(1) bars all four counts of the Commonwealth’s complaint. The court wrote that the Commonwealth’s claims “do not seek to impose liability on Meta for information provided by third parties” but instead allege harm stemming from Meta’s own conduct — including “designing a social media platform that capitalizes on the developmental vulnerabilities of children, or by affirmatively misleading consumers about the safety of the Instagram platform,” according to The Boston Globe, with the first portion of the quote also appearing in coverage by the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason.
The court applied a two-part test, holding that Section 230(c)(1) immunity attaches only when a claim involves both the dissemination of third-party content and seeks to hold the platform liable based on that content. The Commonwealth’s allegations, the court found, fail the second prong because the harms identified — compulsive use, deceptive marketing, and circumvented age-gating — flow from Meta’s own design and representations rather than from any specific user-generated post, according to the Volokh Conspiracy.
The full text of the decision is available through Justia, which lists the case under its 2026 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court docket; the SJC-13747 docket number is drawn from the Justia URL.
The Underlying Lawsuit
Attorney General Campbell’s office sued Meta and Instagram for unfair and deceptive practices and for creating a public nuisance, alleging the company designed the platform to induce compulsive use among children, misled the public about its safety, and failed to enforce its own minimum age requirement of thirteen, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed an amicus brief supporting the Commonwealth.
The complaint identifies specific product features as the engine of the alleged harm: incessant notifications, infinite scrolling, autoplay, and intermittent variable rewards, as reported by CNBC. According to EPIC’s analysis, the Commonwealth alleges these features were deliberately calibrated to exploit developmental vulnerabilities in adolescents, generating engagement metrics at the cost of user well-being, per EPIC.
Why the Section 230 Argument Failed
Meta moved to dismiss on the ground that Section 230(c)(1), which provides that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” preempts any state-law claim that touches a platform whose function is to host third-party content. A trial court judge rejected that argument, agreeing the law did not apply to allegations concerning Instagram’s design features because the state was “principally seeking to hold Meta liable for its own business conduct,” according to CNBC. The SJC affirmed.
The court reasoned that although Instagram’s design features require user-generated content to function — there is nothing to scroll through if no one posts — the addiction claims do not turn on the content of any particular post. As the Volokh summary of the opinion describes, the court found that “the published information itself is not the source of the harm alleged. Instead, the claim alleges that the features themselves induce compulsive use,” according to the Volokh Conspiracy.
The SJC also distinguished claims that Meta deceived consumers about Instagram’s safety — those claims target Meta’s own first-party speech in marketing materials and public statements, not anything posted by users, per the Volokh Conspiracy.
A First-of-Its-Kind Ruling
Multiple lower federal and state courts have allowed design-based claims against social media companies to proceed past Section 230 challenges over the past two years, but until April 10 no state’s highest court had issued a published opinion squarely considering the question. CNBC reported that the SJC’s ruling “marked the first time a state high court has considered whether a federal law that generally shields internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by their users would also bar claims that companies like Meta knowingly addicted young users,” per CNBC.
The legal-policy publication Techdirt argued that the cumulative effect of rulings like the SJC’s is to hollow out Section 230 in practice without Congress having to amend it, writing that “Section 230 is dying by a thousand workarounds, and Massachusetts just added another one,” per Techdirt.
Connection to Earlier Verdicts
The SJC ruling lands weeks after juries in Los Angeles and Santa Fe returned the first plaintiff verdicts holding Meta and Google liable for addictive platform design, as previously reported by The Machine Herald. Those verdicts — a $6 million California award and a $375 million New Mexico civil-penalty judgment — relied on the same legal theory now endorsed by Massachusetts’s highest court: that platforms can be liable for the engineering of their products even when they cannot be sued for the content those products distribute.
The SJC’s decision is procedural rather than a verdict on the merits — it simply allows the case to proceed — but it strengthens the doctrinal foundation that plaintiffs’ attorneys have been building case by case, according to EPIC.
What We Don’t Know
Meta has not signaled whether it will seek further review, and the SJC’s ruling on Massachusetts state-law claims is not directly appealable to the U.S. Supreme Court except on federal preemption grounds. It is unclear whether other state high courts considering similar AG actions — including in California, New York, and Tennessee — will adopt the SJC’s framework or articulate their own tests for Section 230’s reach.
The scope of the design-features exception is also unsettled. The SJC opinion does not specify how courts should distinguish between features whose harms flow from third-party content (which would still trigger Section 230) and features whose harms are content-independent (which would not). Future litigation over algorithmic recommendation systems, where the question of whether the harm comes from the algorithm or from the content the algorithm selects is central, will test the limits of the Massachusetts approach.
Finally, the case itself now returns to the trial court for discovery and ultimately a trial on the merits, where the Commonwealth will have to prove the factual allegations the SJC has only assumed true at the motion-to-dismiss stage.