U.S. District Judge Ann Marie McIff Allen for Utah in Salt Lake City recused herself from the case in which NetChoice is seeking to defeat Utah’s newly enacted Minor Protection in Social Media Act, said the judge’s signed recusal order Monday (docket 2:23-cv-00911). The case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby, said a text-only docket notice Tuesday. NetChoice seeks a preliminary injunction blocking Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) and Katherine Hass, director of Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection, from enforcing the statute when it takes effect Oct. 1 (see 2405060006). NetChoice calls the statute “an unconstitutional restriction on minors’ and adults’ ability to access and engage in protected speech.”
The “hidden spy pixel trackers” that Target embeds in its marketing emails to customers violate Arizona’s Telephone, Utility and Communication Service Records Act, alleged a class action Tuesday (docket 2:24-cv-01048) in U.S. District Court for Arizona.
Four school district tagalong class actions were transferred to In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation Tuesday in conditional transfer order 31 (CTO-31), said a clerk’s notice (docket 3047) for the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Twenty actions were transferred to U.S. District Court for Northern California in Oakland in October 2022 for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings and assigned to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Since then, 141 additional actions involving questions of fact that are common to the actions previously transferred have been transferred to the court, said the order. Two of the four cases in CTO-31 vs. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap and TikTok are from U.S. District Court for Middle Florida, one is from Maryland federal court and one from U.S. District Court for Eastern North Carolina. The lawsuits allege social media platforms are responsible for a rise in mental health disorders among U.S. youth.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled oral argument for July 17 at 9 a.m. PDT in San Francisco of California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s (D) appeal from the district court's order preliminarily enjoining him from enforcing the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (see 2312140003) (docket 23-2969), said an oral argument notice Monday. Also on the July 17 calendar in the same courtroom is oral argument in the appeal from the denial of X's motion for a preliminary injunction to block Bonta’s enforcement of AB-587, requiring social media companies to provide the state with semiannual disclosures of their content-moderation policies (see 2401190038) (docket 24-271), said the notice. The 9th Circuit has apportioned oral argument time of 20 minutes per side in each appeal, said the notice.
NetChoice seeks a preliminary injunction blocking Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) and Katherine Hass, director of Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection, from enforcing the state’s newly enacted Minor Protection in Social Media Act when it takes effect Oct. 1, said its motion Friday (docket 2:23-cv-00911) in U.S. District Court for Utah in Salt Lake City. The statute “is an unconstitutional restriction on minors’ and adults’ ability to access and engage in protected speech,” it said. It “impermissibly regulates the conditions under which minors and adults can access certain websites and how those websites facilitate, disseminate, and display protected speech,” it said. The entire statute violates the First Amendment and the due process clause “because its definition of what entities are covered is unconstitutional,” it said. Parts of the statute also “independently violate” the First Amendment and the due process clause and are federally preempted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it said. It’s the second time Utah has enacted a law “violating bedrock constitutional principles of free speech” in attempting to regulate minors’ access to social media, it said. After Utah enacted 2023’s Social Media Regulation Act, NetChoice sued and moved to preliminarily enjoin that law’s enforcement, it said. Utah responded by repealing its 2023 law and replacing it in part with the new statute, it said. But the newly enacted statute “suffers from many of the same flaws ... while at the same time creating new ones,” it said. The statute regulates websites’ ability to publish and distribute speech to minors and speech by minors, it said. It also regulates minors’ ability to produce and receive speech and adults’ access to speech, it said. Minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, said NetChoice. Governments can’t burden adults’ right to access protected speech “in their efforts to regulate the speech appropriate for minors,” it said. The court “should reach the same result as courts across the country that have enjoined similar attempts to regulate online speech,” it said. “Regrettably, Utah’s government has chosen to double down on its misguided laws that thwart parents, undermine the state's dynamic creator economy, jeopardize the data security of its citizens and violate their constitutional rights,” said Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, in a statement Friday. Utahns, not the government, “should be able to determine how they and their families use technology,” he said.
NetChoice and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) filed dueling motions for summary judgment Friday (docket 2:24-cv-00047) in U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio over the state's social media parental notification law. NetChoice’s motion seeks to permanently block the statute on constitutional grounds, while Yost’s motion defends the law as "valid," and argues for its enforcement.
The U.S. District Court for Southern New York has denied the motion of three plaintiff-appellees to enforce the preliminary injunction order that bars New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) from enforcing the state’s hateful conduct law, Sarah Coco, assistant solicitor general in James’ office, wrote the clerk of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court in a Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(j) letter Thursday (23-356). James’ 2nd Circuit appeal seeks to lift the injunction, but the appeal is being held in abeyance, pending the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in NetChoice’s First Amendment challenges to the Texas and Florida social media content moderation laws (see 2402230077). The New York law, Section 394-ccc, requires social media networks to give users a mechanism for reporting hateful conduct on the platforms. The law also requires the networks to disclose a policy explaining how they will respond to those user reports. The three plaintiff-appellees -- UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, plus the Rumble Canada and Locals Technology online networks -- contended in their motion that James violated the injunction by sending voluntary requests for information to social media networks, including plaintiff Rumble Canada, said Coco’s letter. According to the plaintiff-appellees’ motion, James improperly sought information about the networks’ responses to the proliferation of calls for violence against Jewish and Muslim people on social media in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, said the letter. But the district court’s denial of the motion absolved James of any wrongdoing, said the letter.
Comedy record label 800 Pound Gorilla Media discloses consumers’ Facebook ID (FID) and the titles of videos they have viewed, in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), alleged a class action Thursday (docket 3:24-cv-00787) Thursday in U.S. District Court for Southern California in San Diego.
A researcher who developed a browser extension that would allow Facebook users to “turn off their newsfeed” preemptively has sued Meta, seeking a judicial declaration that his software tool is “immunized from legal liability” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation vacated conditional transfer order 30 (CTO-30), said a Tuesday filing (docket 3047) in In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation before the JPML. On Friday, in Nasca et al v. ByteDance, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis for Eastern New York in Brooklyn granted plaintiffs Dean and Michelle Nasca’s motion to remand their product liability and negligence lawsuit against TikTok, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, MTA Long Island Railroad and Islip, Long Island, to Suffolk County Supreme Court for lack of jurisdiction. The Nascas sued TikTok in U.S. District Court for Northern California in March 2023 following the death of their 16-year-old son, Chase, who died by suicide the previous year after the platform allegedly directed him to adult accounts with "thousands" of “highly depressive, violent, self-harm and suicide themed content." TikTok included the Nascas' case in a notice of potential tagalong actions to Social Media Adolescent Addiction, and the JPML conditionally transferred it to the MDL in CTO-30.