Credit: Canva
UPDATE, 10 August 2026, 21:00 CEST: The Ninth Circuit has also refused to pause the first trial. Meta had asked for an emergency stay while its appeal was pending. The court held that request moot, on the same ground as the ruling itself: it has no jurisdiction to hear the appeal yet.
That leaves the trial date standing. Jury selection begins on Wednesday in federal court in Oakland, California. Opening arguments follow on 18 August. The trial could run for several weeks.
Bloomberg’s Isaiah Poritz reported the denial. Circuit Judge Jacqueline Nguyen wrote the opinion, in Personal Injury Plaintiffs v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 9th Cir., No. 24-7037. Meta did not immediately return a request for comment.
The wider docket has moved with it. New Mexico’s total against Meta now stands at almost $950m. That figure combines the $375m verdict in March with the $567m youth mental health fund a judge ordered on 7 August.
Other cases are running in parallel. A Tennessee state trial is midway, and a Los Angeles jury has awarded a woman $6m against Meta and Google’s YouTube. The first school-district trials do not begin until February 2027.
The Ninth Circuit handed the social media companies a defeat on Monday. It did not hand them a ruling.
The San Francisco appeals court rejected their bid to overturn a lower court and shut down some 2,400 federal lawsuits over claims they built their products to addict young users. Reuters’ Diana Novak Jones reported the decision from Chicago.
What the panel left alone carries more weight than what it decided. Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google, ByteDance’s TikTok and Snap had argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 covers more than the posts their users write. It also covers, they said, the allegation that they failed to warn anyone about addictive design.
The court never reached that. It said the appeal came too early. Most appeals follow a trial, so a district judge’s decision gets its review once the case ends.
The judges flagged this in January
The panel had already signalled the problem at oral argument on 6 January. Circuit Judges Jacqueline Nguyen and Mark Bennett sat with District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the Eastern District of New York.
Meta’s counsel James Rouhandeh pressed the broad reading of the statute. “It would be an enormous thing to require defendants to have to defend these types of suits,” he told the panel.
Nguyen gave the sharpest answer of the day. “When Congress wants to give immunity from suit, it knows how to say that.”
Colorado solicitor general Shannon Stevenson argued for the states that the features at issue work independently of anything a user posts. “Here our complaints are about features that they can remedy without looking at any third party content at all.”
Reuters reports one judge observing that Congress could have written an explicit shield from broad liability had it wanted one. Treat that as a signal, not a holding. Nobody voted on it.
The order of events just flipped
Read the ruling for what it changes rather than what it says. The companies wanted the shield question settled first and the trials second. They now get the trials first and the shield question later, on appeal from final judgments.
The volume explains why that matters. Reuters counts roughly 2,400 lawsuits in front of US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. States, municipalities, school districts and individuals filed them, seeking damages, penalties and restitution. Another 3,300 or so sit in a consolidated proceeding in California state court.
The companies appealed Rogers’ orders from 2023 and 2024, which largely let the litigation move forward. Three years of appellate effort produced a decision about scheduling.
Meta faces four states on 18 August
Rogers cleared the states to try their claims on 1 July. She found material disputes over whether the products addict minors and whether Meta deliberately targeted them. Twenty-nine states are pursuing separate claims under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey open their case against Meta on 18 August. Meta told the court the four states want $1.4 trillion in penalties, a figure close to its entire market value. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” it argued.
Juries have already answered twice
A Los Angeles jury reached the first verdict in March. It found Meta and Google negligent for designing platforms that harm young people, and it awarded $6m to a woman, now 20, who says she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child. The jury deliberated 43 hours and split the award 70-30 between the two companies.
Google has since told an appeals court that YouTube is not social media. Its filing argues the service offers video sharing and streaming rather than a feed like Instagram or TikTok.
The second verdict landed in New Mexico the same month. A jury agreed that Meta misled users about safety and enabled child sexual exploitation, and it set damages at $375m.
Reuters notes that the judge there is still weighing platform changes and further damages. He has already moved. On Friday, Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to put $567m into a youth mental health fund, $420m for treatment services and $147m for awareness and prevention over five years. Meta says it will appeal.
What the companies keep
Nothing in Monday’s decision touches the merits. The panel did not rule that Section 230 leaves design claims uncovered. It ruled that it would look at the question later, and the statute survives Monday exactly as it stood on Friday.
Meta and Google both deny the underlying claims and say they will appeal the March verdicts. Meta disputes the $1.4 trillion demand and argues that social media addiction carries no recognition as a psychiatric diagnosis.
The plaintiffs, for their part, had asked for precisely this outcome. They told the appeals court that the trial judge’s ruling was not final and therefore not appealable. They argued separately that Section 230 does not reach claims about how a company operates and designs a product. The court took the first point and left the second untouched.
The question that survives
Legal specialists expect the eventual appeals to turn on whether Section 230 covers design choices at all. That question reaches well past these four companies. Every recommendation engine, autoplay default and notification schedule on the consumer internet rests on the answer.
For now the ruling settles the sequence and not the substance. The companies asked an appeals court to spare them the juries. Instead they get the juries, and the shield question waits until the verdicts arrive.
Eight days from now, four states start telling one of those juries what Meta knew.
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