Two members of the Rohingya community, a persecuted ethnic minority in Myanmar, sued Meta in California federal court, alleging that Facebook’s algorithmic design amplified anti-Rohingya hate speech, incited violence against their villages, and contributed to genocide. Plaintiffs argued that defendant built Facebook in a way that deliberately rewarded toxic and inflammatory content, flooding the platform with incitement to violence and ultimately enabling mass atrocities.
Should Myanmar law govern a dispute in California?
Plaintiffs asked the court to hold defendant liable under California tort law, including claims for strict products liability, negligence, and negligent product design. In an effort to sidestep Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the federal law that broadly shields internet platforms from liability for third-party content) plaintiffs also asked the court to apply Myanmar law rather than United States law. Because Myanmar has no equivalent to Section 230, plaintiffs argued that applying Myanmar’s legal framework would allow their claims to proceed without running into federal immunity.
The district court dismissed the case. Plaintiffs sought review with the Ninth Circuit. On appeal, the court held that Section 230 barred all of plaintiffs’ claims, and that California’s choice-of-law rules did not require the court to apply Myanmar law in place of the federal statute.
Myanmar’s interest significant but not articulated
The court ruled this way on the choice-of-law question because plaintiffs failed to establish that Myanmar had a sufficient legal interest to displace United States law. California uses a three-step “governmental interest test” to resolve conflicts between the laws of different jurisdictions.
At the first step, the court found that the laws clearly differed: Section 230 provides broad immunity to platforms such as defendant, while Myanmar offers no comparable protection.
At the second step, however, plaintiffs’ argument broke down. To establish a “true conflict” requiring the court to weigh competing interests, plaintiffs needed to show that Myanmar’s interest was grounded in actual, enforceable law. Plaintiffs submitted an expert report identifying three sources of Myanmar law: common law torts, the Electronic Transactions Law of 2004, and the Telecommunications Act of 2013. But plaintiffs’ own expert admitted it could find no Myanmar case involving a social media company. The Electronic Transactions Law addressed only electronic signatures and data storage. The Telecommunications Act addressed harassment and defamation over telecom networks. Neither statute spoke to the liability of a social media platform as a publisher of third-party content.
The court concluded that Myanmar’s interest in protecting its citizens, while genuine, was not sufficiently incorporated into Myanmar’s positive law to predominate over the United States’ clearly articulated interest in applying Section 230. Because plaintiffs could not establish a true conflict, the court applied Section 230 and dismissed all claims.
Needless analysis because of the Constitution
One judge wrote separately in a concurrence to argue that the court should not have conducted the choice-of-law analysis at all. In his view, the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, which establishes federal law as supreme over any conflicting state law, means that California’s choice-of-law rules cannot direct a court to apply foreign law in place of a federal statute. What a state cannot do directly, it cannot do through a procedural workaround.
That constitutional question remains unresolved, because the majority declined to reach it. But the practical stakes are significant: if a court were ever to accept the theory plaintiffs advanced, it would create a roadmap for routing future cases through jurisdictions with flexible choice-of-law rules in order to circumvent Section 230 entirely, without any act of Congress. The Ninth Circuit’s decision forecloses that path for now, though the majority’s silence on the constitutional question leaves the door open for future plaintiffs to try again.
Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 24-1672 (9th Cir. Apr. 28, 2026)