US Court Dismisses Rohingya Hate Speech Lawsuit Against Meta

Plaintiffs argued that Facebook helped spread hate speech that “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.”

Facebook’s parent company Meta has been spared a lawsuit accusing the social media platform of failing to moderate hate speech against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, which contributed to a military-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in 2017.

In a ruling handed down on Tuesday, a U.S. Ninth Circuit panel in San Francisco found that the plaintiff’s claims were barred under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity for online platforms about third-party content posted by their users, the Courthouse News Service reported.

In its summary of the ruling, the panel stated that Section 230 “protects Meta from claims that seek to treat it as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

“Plaintiffs believe that Facebook’s design, coupled with the darker elements of human nature, caused real-world harm,” U.S. Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in his opinion. “But Section 230, as we have interpreted it, bars their claims, and we cannot hold Meta ‘responsible for the unfortunate realities of human nature.’”

In August 2017, after several years of intensifying discrimination, the Myanmar military launched a “clearance operation” against the Rohingya in Rakhine State that United Nations investigators later said showed “genocidal intent.” During the campaign, soldiers and ethnic Rakhine vigilantes torched villages and shot civilians, and drove an estimated 740,000 Rohingya civilians over the border into Bangladesh, where most remain today in large refugee camps.

Two anonymous Rohingya plaintiffs initiated the class action against Meta in late 2021, seeking at least $150 billion in damages.

The plaintiffs argued that Facebook’s arrival in Myanmar helped spread hate speech, misinformation, and incitement to violence that “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.” Specifically, they alleged that Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people and that the company didn’t spend enough money to hire moderators and fact checkers who spoke the local languages or understood the political situation.

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2024 on the grounds that the plaintiff’s claims were “barred by the two-year statute of limitations for personal injury claims.” The plaintiffs then appealed and urged the Ninth Circuit to reconsider their suit.

Facebook is undeniably an important part of the story of Myanmar’s political opening in the 2010s, and the wave of ethnic and sectarian conflict that accompanied it. The platform attained a nearly overnight prominence in 2014, along with the sudden arrival of cheap 3G cellphone connections, and was adopted by actors across Myanmar’s political spectrum – including Buddhist chauvinists and Rakhine ultras.

In March 2018, Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, reported that social media platforms, particularly Facebook, had played a “determining role” in the violence against the Rohingya, and had “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict” in the country.

Whether or not Meta was liable under U.S. law was, of course, another question, particularly given the wide latitude that Section 230 grants to American tech platforms. To get around this, the plaintiffs attempted to argue that the court should consider Myanmar’s law, but the panel did not accept this line of reasoning.

“At bottom, Myanmar’s interest in protecting its citizens from harmful attacks and misinformation on Facebook, while real, is insufficiently incorporated into the positive law of the country,” Nelson wrote. “Myanmar’s interest therefore does not predominate.”

https://thediplomat.com/2026/04/us-court-dismisses-rohingya-hate-speech-lawsuit-against-meta/