Can I Sue a Social Media Platform?

Because the law does not view social media platforms as publishers or speakers of content posted by users, they cannot be held liable for third-party content. They also can’t be held liable for their good-faith decision to remove content they find objectionable. Together, this means social media companies are immune from most civil lawsuits.

But exceptions exist for:

• Violation of intellectual property rights
• Breach of contract
• Failure to warn of known illegal activity (failure to warn)
• Direct involvement in harmful content

Taking on Big Tech is a challenge. Social media companies are highly resourced, with dedicated in-house legal teams specializing in defending lawsuits brought on by platform users. If you are considering suing a social media platform, consult with an experienced civil litigation attorney first.

Modern Social Media Sites and Stats

Today, there are several major social media platforms and online answer forums. The largest and most popular include:

• Reddit (launched in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian)
• YouTube (launched in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim)
• Facebook (founded in 2006 by Mark Zuckerberg)
• X, formerly Twitter (founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and others)
• Pinterest (launched in 2010 by Ben Silbermann)
• Instagram (founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom)
• Snapchat (launched in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy)
• TikTok (launched in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance)
• Quora (founded in June 2009 by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever)
• Wikipedia (launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger) 

These platforms serve a combined total of approximately 5.24 billion social media users as of February 2025. According to Data Portal, those users:

• Comprise 63.9% of the total global population
• Spend two hours, 21 minutes on social media platforms daily
• Use an average of 6.8 social platforms per month

Dealing With Offensive or Defamatory Social Media Posts

Here is an example: Say you run a restaurant. You have pages on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram sites, and your staff posts funny restaurant videos on TikTok. One day, a member of your staff shows you a screenshot of a Facebook post that really upsets you:

“I wouldn’t eat at that place if you paid me! I heard the owner is a racist pedophile!”

But this is an untrue statement. You immediately report this false statement to Facebook.

Days go by, and you notice a drop in your business. You check Facebook again and see that the comment is still there. You report it again, but Facebook doesn’t take it down.

That’s when you decide to contact a lawyer and see what you can do. Unfortunately, the lawyer tells you there isn’t much you can do against the platform, Meta, for failing to intervene. 

Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996

With only limited exceptions, federal law generally immunizes social media platforms from civil lawsuits, including defamation lawsuits, based on content posted by third parties.

In 1996, years before the first modern social media platforms were invented, Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to help promote the growth of the rapidly developing internet in light of free speech. Congress believed that if “interactive computer services” could be held liable for content posted by third parties, the threat of litigation would deter people from creating new sites.

As a result, it passed section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which largely does two things:

• It specifically excludes social media platforms from being a “publisher.”
• It protects “good faith” content moderation.

Not a Publisher or a Speaker

First, section 230 states that “interactive computer services,” which today includes social media platforms, cannot be treated as the “publisher” or “speaker” of content posted by others on their sites. If the platform isn’t considered to be the publisher or the speaker of the content, they aren’t legally responsible for the content.

Section 230 essentially immunizes online platforms from most state law claims, also known as “torts“. This means you wouldn’t be able to sue Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media site in court for:

• Defamation
• Intentional infliction of emotional distress
• Online harassment
• Cyberbullying

Content Moderation Decisions

Second, section 230 grants social media platforms broad protection from lawsuits based on content moderation decisions. As long as they act in “good faith,” they are free to remove any “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” content. Or, they can choose to leave it up. It’s up to them to decide whether something is harmful and remove it.

Getting back to the restaurant example, you can’t sue Facebook because it fails to remove an offensive post directed at you. This is still true even if the post is completely false. Your lawyer tells you that if you were to sue Facebook, a court would most likely dismiss your case, despite the defamatory content, because of this broad grant of immunity.

That’s not to say you can’t sue someone, but tracking down the user who posted the comment poses a challenge.

Exceptions to Section 230

There are ways around section 230 immunity. Some of these are expressly in the statute. Others are legal theories you might be able to raise in your specific case.

Intellectual Property Claims

You can sue social media platforms if they violate your intellectual property rights.

Suppose you wrote an original poem and included it in the menu on your Facebook page. An anonymous user copies your poem and posts it on another Facebook page. You would be able to sue Facebook for copyright infringement. This is why the platform quickly removes posts that implicate copyright or other intellectual property rights.

The law recognizes the difficulty of a platform to regulate millions (if not billions) of potential submissions. Even giant social media platforms like YouTube have this problem. They would need to design complicated algorithms and hire millions of moderators to review all of this content. So the government has considered what a fair solution would be. 

That’s where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) comes in. The law requires online platforms to take notice of cease and desist letters that warn them about potentially infringing content. Most, if not all, online content publishers have “DMCA Takedown Portals” that make the process even easier by allowing owners to submit copyright claims against infringing content posted to these websites by unauthorized third parties.

If an online answer forum ignores a copyright owner’s cease and desist request or otherwise has no DMCA-complaint method to allow rights holders to report infringing content, they could face legal action, and Section 230 won’t provide legal protections.

Content Created By the Social Media Platform

Another exception to immunity is for content that the social media platform itself creates. While they can’t be liable for content someone else posts, they are legally responsible for their own content. So if a representative of Facebook had posted the comment about your restaurant, you could sue Facebook for online defamation.

Keep in mind, you usually can’t sue an online platform or online answer forum for defamation based on an answer, review, or other content someone posted on that platform. That kind of information would be protected by Section 230. If you’re suing the internet answer forum for defamation directly, they will need to be acting as the speaker of whatever defamatory allegation that’s being said about you.

Unfair Competition and Content Moderation

If an answer forum is purposefully deleting certain answers and promoting other ones without having a good reason (e.g. to promote accuracy, safety, or other legal requirement), Section 230 might not protect them.

Unfair competition claims vary greatly across states. At the federal level, the Lanham Act prohibits false advertising, which is one kind of unfair competition claim.

Let’s say an imaginary online startup named Buzzy commits the following legal elements that make it liable for false advertising under federal law:

• Through selective moderation of answers posted on its website, Buzzy allows false statements or misleadingly-positive statements about Brand X to stay up, but anything bad said about Brand Y — even if true — is deleted by the mods;
• This causes actual deception to happen, meaning a large portion of the potential buyers for Brand X and Brand Y are affected by the biased deletion and non-deletion of answers on Buzzy’s platform; and
• Buzzy’s deceptive moderation practices end up affecting the purchasing decisions of Brand X and Brand Y users across the country and between states, causing potential injury to Brand Y (while benefiting Brand Y’s competitor, Brand X).

Just replace Brand X and Brand Y with any two popular competing products. If an online answer forum is helping one soda brand by moderating answers in a way that hurts the soda brand’s competition (i.e. other soda brands), Section 230 will not protect the answer forum from being sued by the soda brands who are injured (or even just potentially injured) by the unfair competition promoted by the platform.

Other Statutory Exceptions

Section 230 contains a few additional exceptions to immunity. Social media companies are not immune from federal criminal prosecution. They can also be sued for violating certain privacy laws applicable to electronic communications. Finally, they are not immune from state or federal laws relating to sex trafficking.

Other Legal Theories: Breach of Contract and Failure to Warn

A few people have managed to circumvent section 230 immunity when the conduct of the social media company itself was at issue. In one case, a user reported a post, and the social media company promised to remove it. They didn’t. Rather than sue the social media company for the offensive post, the user successfully sued it for breach of contract.

In another case, a social media platform was aware that two of its users were convicted sex offenders and that they used the platform to find hookups. They raped one of the women they met on the site. The victim successfully sued the social media platform for failing to warn her of the danger posed by the two users.

Note that in both of these situations, the claim against the social media platform was not based on the content of a third party’s post. The claims were based on the conduct of the social media platform itself.

Before You Sue: Check for Arbitration and Disclaimer Clauses

If you’re not a user or subscriber of the online platform that you’re trying to sue, you might not have to worry about any restrictive user agreements that you agreed to. But even then, most websites have “terms of use” agreements that may apply even just to temporary visitors.

Some of these agreements restrict your ability to sue:

• An arbitration clause can state that you have to bring your complaint in front of a private decisionmaker (the “arbitrator”) who is usually a retired judge or experienced attorney. That means a court with a judge and jury won’t hear your case, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.
• A disclaimer clause may say that the online answer forum or social media platform does not guarantee the right answers or that you won’t be harmed in the course of using the website.

For example, if you look yourself up on a search engine and you get www.quora.com as your first result, you might not be visiting Quora with the intent of subscribing to their answer forum. Instead, you’re probably there because the search engine saw a lot of answer views or “upvotes” relating to your name, and gave you those search results. If you go to the site, you will probably be bound by the terms of use.

Keep in mind that even with arbitration and disclaimer clauses in the way, you can still bring a claim. If you’re forced to bring an arbitration claim, you can still pursue the same claims in arbitration that you’d otherwise be “suing” for in court.

If You Are Upset With a Social Media Company, Consult a Lawyer

Generally speaking, if you can show that your legal claim is based on something other than the content of another user’s post, you may be able to sue the social media company. Otherwise, section 230’s broad grant of immunity would bar your claim.

Even though section 230 is 30 years old, this is still an evolving area of the law. Lawmakers in Congress have talked about amending, or even repealing, section 230. And, in the right case, you may be able to avoid section 230 immunity entirely.

What Kind of Lawyer Do I Need?

Depending on the nature of your claim, you may benefit from working with:

• An intellectual property attorney
• A contract law attorney
• A personal injury attorney

The right attorney can give valuable legal advice and help you decide if legal action is the best course of action. An experienced attorney in your area can provide legal advice specific to your situation, explain your rights, and represent you if suing a social media company is in your best interest.