Meta Platforms and Instagram asked Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal to stop the Attorney General’s consumer-protection lawsuit over Instagram’s design before the case reaches trial. In Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Office of the Attorney General, No. 2D2025-3187, decided November 4, 2026, the court dismissed the petition. It held that Meta cannot show the irreparable harm the court needs before it can review this kind of ruling. Judge Smith wrote the opinion. Judges Morris and Labrit concurred.
The lawsuit
The Attorney General’s one-count complaint, filed in Pasco County circuit court, alleges violations of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It alleges that “Defendants’ Platforms cause serious harm to children, parents, and the community at large by deploying algorithms and other features designed to hijack the attention of its users, barrage them with advertisements, and relentlessly mine their interactions for monetizable data.” The complaint seeks civil penalties and temporary and permanent injunctions.
Meta moved to dismiss. It argued that Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment bar the case. The Attorney General answered that the complaint targets Meta’s own conduct, the design of what it calls “Addictive Features,” and not Meta’s editorial choices about other people’s content. The trial court denied the motion in a brief order, finding that the complaint “sufficiently pleads the claims.” Meta did not challenge the ruling on the separate ground that the complaint fails to state a Florida cause of action.
Why Meta used certiorari
A denial of a motion to dismiss is not a final order. Appellate Rule 9.130(a)(3)(F) allows an immediate appeal when a motion to dismiss asserts certain kinds of immunity, such as qualified or absolute immunity in a federal civil rights claim, immunity under section 768.28(9), sovereign immunity, or immunity under section 776.032. Section 230 is not on that list, so Meta filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, which the court described as an extraordinary remedy. Before the court may consider whether the trial court got the law wrong, the petitioner must show a material injury that cannot be fixed on appeal after final judgment. The court treated that irreparable-harm question as the threshold, and said it was reviewing “this case of first impression” in the certiorari context.
The holding
The court held that Section 230 does not give Meta an absolute right to avoid being sued at all. It reasoned that the statute’s text shields a provider from being treated as the publisher or speaker of another person’s content and from liability for good-faith efforts to restrict objectionable material. The court wrote: “This type of limited statutory immunity is not absolute immunity from involvement in any type of lawsuit, such that, here, Meta would suffer irreparable harm merely by litigating the matter.”
The court compared Section 230 with the limited immunities the Florida Supreme Court has already treated as not enough for certiorari: governmental statutory immunity in Citizens Property Insurance Corp. v. San Perdido Ass’n and the anti-SLAPP statute in Vericker v. Powell. Like the petitioner in Vericker, the court said, Meta “asserts nothing more than the hardships of continued litigation,” which the supreme court has held insufficient. The court quoted San Perdido for the point that this kind of immunity “is not lost merely because review must wait until after a final judgment.” The court also noted that, although Vericker declined certiorari relief, the supreme court amended Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.130(a)(3) in a separate opinion to allow certain immediate appeals in anti-SLAPP cases.
Meta had relied on Giordano v. Romeo, a 2011 Third District decision that described the Communications Decency Act as giving online providers absolute immunity. The Second District said Giordano “misconstrued Doe,” meaning the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Doe v. America Online, and wrote that “with the exception of the outlier Giordano, based upon this court’s canvass of the decisional law, no court has held that section 230 confers absolute immunity.” In a footnote it noted that the Ninth Circuit held in 2026, in California v. Meta Platforms, that it lacked jurisdiction to review a Section 230 ruling before final judgment because the provision is a defense to liability and not immunity from suit. The footnote also cites contrary authority: the Fourth Circuit, in Nemet Chevrolet, Ltd. v. Consumeraffairs.com, Inc., held that section 230 confers immunity from suit. The court added that federal decisions other than those of the United States Supreme Court do not bind Florida courts.
The First Amendment argument
Meta also argued that the order chills its speech. The court disagreed. “The challenged order does not come close to infringing on Meta’s First Amendment rights,” it wrote. The order did not alter the status quo, did not place new restrictions on Meta, did not grant the Attorney General’s request for an injunction, and did not compel Meta to do anything.
What the court did not decide
The court said it did “not reach the merits of the petition.” A footnote states: “Nothing herein shall be construed in any way to constitute a comment on the merits of the Attorney General’s FDUTPA complaint or Meta’s claim of immunity from liability under section 230 or the First Amendment.” The trial court’s denial of the motion to dismiss stands, and the opinion does not say how the Attorney General’s claims will fare.
The opinion is marked “subject to revision prior to official publication.”
Read the opinion (PDF): Download the opinion (PDF)