In recent years, there have been a number of suits filed in federal courts seeking to hold social media platforms responsible for providing material support to terrorists by allowing members of such groups to use social media accounts and failing to effectively block their content and terminate such accounts. As we’ve previously written about, such suits have generally not been successful at either the district court or circuit court level and have been dismissed on the merits or on the basis of immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).

This past month, in a lengthy, important 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of federal Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) claims against Facebook on CDA grounds for allegedly providing “material support” to Hamas. The court also declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over plaintiff’s foreign law claims. (Force v. Facebook, Inc., No. 18-397 (2d Cir. July 31, 2019)).  Despite the plaintiffs’ creative pleadings that sought to portray Facebook’s processing of third-party content as beyond the scope of CDA immunity, the court found that claims related to supplying a communication forum and failing to completely block or eliminate hateful terrorist content necessarily treated Facebook as the publisher of such content and were therefore barred under the CDA.