On April 10, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a first-of-its-kind ruling: Meta Platforms, the owner of Instagram, cannot hide behind a federal law it has long used as a shield to escape accountability for designing a platform that allegedly exploits children’s neurological vulnerabilities to create addiction. The unanimous decision allows Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s lawsuit against Meta to proceed to trial in Superior Court.
It is the first time a full panel of justices at the highest level of any state court has ruled that the federal Communications Decency Act does not automatically protect a social media company from claims rooted in how it designed its platform, as opposed to what users posted on it. For Massachusetts families whose children have been harmed by compulsive social media use, the ruling matters.
What the AG’s Lawsuit Alleges
The Commonwealth filed suit against Meta in October 2023, laying out three categories of claims under Massachusetts consumer protection law.
The first is that Meta deliberately engineered Instagram’s features, including infinite scroll, autoplay on Stories and Reels, and notification systems, to exploit the neurological vulnerability of teenage brains to dopamine-driven feedback loops. Meta’s own internal research, according to the complaint, showed the company knew teenage users had a significantly harder time stopping excessive use than adults, and leadership pressed forward anyway.
The second is that Meta publicly claimed its age-gating technology prevented children under 13 from accessing Instagram, while knowing that hundreds of thousands of underage users had active accounts and that the age-verification measures were ineffective. The AG alleges Meta refused to invest in systems that would actually work.
The third is that Instagram constitutes a public nuisance because its addictive design has caused widespread, documented harm to the mental health of Massachusetts children.
What Meta Argued, and Why the SJC Disagreed
Meta’s primary defense was that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law, immunized it from all of these claims. Section 230 generally protects online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. Meta argued broadly that its design choices, including how and to whom content is shown, are the acts of a publisher and therefore fall within that immunity.
The SJC rejected that interpretation. Writing for the unanimous court, Justice Dalila Wendlandt drew a line between liability for user-generated content, which Section 230 protects, and liability for a company’s own product design choices, which it does not. The Commonwealth’s claims, the court found, are not about what Instagram users posted. They are about what Meta itself built and how Meta itself chose to build it. Those are the company’s own acts, not a publisher’s decisions about third-party content, and Section 230 does not reach them.
The court also noted that the claims involving defective age-verification features directly addressed harm to underage users who are particularly vulnerable to the design elements at issue, adding another reason those claims fall outside the immunity the statute provides.
Where This Fits in a Larger National Picture
The Massachusetts ruling did not arrive in isolation. In the weeks before the SJC issued its decision, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company misled users and that inadequate safety measures contributed to the sexual exploitation of minors. Days later, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for depression and suicidal ideation in a young woman who became addicted to Instagram and YouTube, awarding $6 million in damages. In both cases, the companies raised Section 230 as a defense, and in both cases courts allowed the trials to proceed.
The Massachusetts decision is notable because it comes from a full appellate court rather than a trial judge, giving it broader precedential weight. Thousands of similar cases are pending in courts around the country, and Meta has estimated potential damages across that litigation reaching into the high tens of billions of dollars.
Separately, just two days before the SJC ruling, the Massachusetts House passed legislation that would ban social media use entirely for children 13 and younger and require parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds.
What This Means for Massachusetts Families
The SJC’s ruling is procedural. It means the lawsuit can go forward, not that Meta has been found liable. The underlying trial on the merits is still ahead. But the legal framework it establishes has direct implications for private families, not just the Attorney General.
The same reasoning that allows the AG’s claims to survive dismissal applies to individual civil claims. If your child has suffered documented mental health harm, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, or suicidal ideation, connected to compulsive Instagram or Facebook use, the theory that Meta’s product design caused that harm is now one that Massachusetts courts have indicated can be pursued.
These cases are complex. They require medical documentation, expert testimony linking the platform’s design to the specific harm suffered, and a clear record of when and how the child used the platform. They are not simple personal injury claims. But the tobacco litigation of the 1990s looked similarly difficult before the internal documents came out. The parallel to what the SJC said just two weeks later in the Fontaine case against Philip Morris is worth noting: companies that knowingly design products to addict children, while publicly denying the harm, face serious exposure under Massachusetts law when the evidence catches up with them.
If your child has experienced significant mental health harm that you believe is connected to social media use, contact Weigand Law at 508-775-3118 or email [email protected] to discuss your situation.
Attorney Blair E. Weigand — Helping those with legal questions for 35 years and counting.