The Ninth Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of a claim challenging Meta’s termination of an online publisher’s Facebook pages, holding that Section 230 barred the case.
Shared Partnership had used Facebook pages and Meta’s self-service advertising system for more than a decade. Meta cancelled the pages in 2020 after repeated policy violations. Shared argued that Meta’s terms of service created a contractual duty and that its claim therefore fell outside the immunity ordinarily available when a platform acts as a publisher of third-party content.
The panel rejected that route around the statute. A contractual promise may support liability where it is genuinely distinct from a platform’s publishing role, the court said, but the label attached to a claim is not decisive. Here, the alleged breach depended on Meta’s authority to review content and terminate an account, conduct the panel treated as a prototypical publishing function.
The dismissal is final at the panel level, subject to any further review sought by Shared. The October 30 opinion is published and precedential.
