Ninth Circuit: Section 230 Bars Facebook Account Contract Claim

The Ninth Circuit held on October 30, 2026 that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act bars a conversion claim against Meta over the cancellation of a business's Facebook pages, even after the plaintiff recast that claim on appeal as a breach of Facebook's Terms of Service.

Information last verified on November 3, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: Published opinion in Shared Partnership v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 25-2612 (9th Cir. Oct. 30, 2026), filed and judgment entered October 30, 2026. The Ninth Circuit's published-opinions database lists one opinion at this docket number and no amending or superseding order as of November 3, 2026. No petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc appears on the public docket for No. 25-2612 as of its most recent public refresh (October 30, 2026, the date of the last known filing). Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40(d)(1), a petition in a civil case of this kind must be filed within 14 days after entry of judgment unless the time is shortened or extended by order or local rule.

Jurisdiction scope: This covers a published federal appellate decision interpreting 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1), applying California law of conversion and contract to the underlying claim. It binds federal district courts within the Ninth Circuit and is persuasive, not controlling, elsewhere. It does not change any state's defamation statute, does not address Section 230(c)(2), and does not address liability of the user who created or posted content.

What Happened

Shared Partnership is a Canadian-based company that, in its own words quoted by the panel, "creates and publishes original, timely, and entertaining [online] content." The panel's own description is less flattering: it calls Shared "an online content creator that specializes in sensationalistic materials" (slip op. at 4), and records that its business model depended on provocative and eye-catching ads to attract clicks, noting that "As its own employees acknowledge, Shared regularly relied on 'scammy' ads and 'blatant clickbait'" (slip op. at 6). It used several Facebook pages and Meta's self-serve advertising service for over a decade, and at one point had approximately 25 million followers on Facebook. Over those years Shared submitted more than 500,000 ads to Meta for review. Meta rejected more than 18,000 of them for a variety of reasons, including sensational or adult content, excessive focus on a body part, and promotion of products or services using deceptive or misleading practices (slip op. at 6).

In October 2020, Meta canceled Shared's Facebook pages for repeatedly violating its terms and policies (slip op. at 8).

Shared sued Meta in the Northern District of California (D.C. No. 3:22-cv-02366-RS, Richard Seeborg, District Judge) for, among other things, conversion and fraudulent inducement, describing Meta's decision to unpublish the Shared Facebook pages as a business "death sentence." The conversion claim rested on that unpublishing, over which Shared argued it held an exclusive property right. The district court dismissed the conversion claim under Section 230, and Shared appealed (slip op. at 8).

On appeal, Shared changed its framing. Rather than press the property theory alone, it recast the conversion claim as a contract-based claim, arguing that Meta had failed to comply with a promise not to remove Shared from Facebook unless Shared had "clearly, seriously, or repeatedly" breached Facebook's terms or policies (slip op. at 10). The panel noted two problems with that. First, Shared's complaint "makes no reference to terms or policies that Meta purportedly breached, or any promise that Meta made." Second, the Terms of Service do not contain the contractual promise Shared newly asserted (slip op. at 11 to 12). The provision Shared pointed to reads:

We want Facebook to be a place where people feel welcome and safe to express themselves and share their thoughts and ideas. If we determine that you have clearly, seriously, or repeatedly breached our Terms or Policies, including in particular our Community Standards, we may suspend or permanently disable access to your account.

Source: Shared Partnership v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 25-2612, slip op. at 12 (9th Cir. Oct. 30, 2026), quoting Meta's Terms of Service.

Reading that clause in context, the panel concluded that it was about Facebook's publishing activities and that it "just restate[s] Meta's ability to exercise editorial discretion." The court put the point directly:

The mere existence of a contractual duty is not a talismanic Section 230 loophole. While Shared couches its claim in contractual terms, Meta still acted like a prototypical publisher when it invoked the Terms of Service to terminate Shared's Facebook account.

Source: Shared Partnership v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 25-2612, slip op. at 4 (9th Cir. Oct. 30, 2026).

The panel also observed, without resting its decision on the point, that Shared "may not even have a viable contractual basis," because the termination clause appears to give Meta unilateral authority to determine whether a business has breached the Community Standards (slip op. at 10 to 11).

The opinion was argued and submitted August 12, 2026 in San Francisco before Circuit Judges Kenneth K. Lee, Salvador Mendoza, Jr., and Ana de Alba, with Judge Lee writing. It is marked FOR PUBLICATION. The disposition is one sentence: "We AFFIRM the dismissal of the conversion claim" (slip op. at 14).

What the Law Actually Says

Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act, codified at 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1), reads in full:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Those are the limiting words that do all the work. The provision does not say a platform is immune from suit, and it does not say a platform owes no duties. It says a claim cannot treat the provider as the publisher or speaker of someone else's content. The Ninth Circuit itself drew that distinction earlier in 2026. In People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 24-7032 (9th Cir. Aug. 10, 2026), the court held that "section 230 merely provides a defense to liability" rather than immunity from suit, and that it therefore lacked appellate jurisdiction to review the denial of that defense on an interlocutory basis. We covered that decision in the Ninth Circuit's ruling that Section 230 is a defense rather than immunity.

The operative test comes from Barnes v. Yahoo!, Inc., No. 05-36189 (9th Cir. filed May 7, 2009, amended June 22, 2009), reported at 570 F.3d 1096. Under Barnes, a claim must be dismissed where (1) the defendant is a provider of an interactive computer service, (2) whom the plaintiff seeks to treat as a publisher or speaker, (3) of information provided by another information content provider. Barnes also supplies the definition the Shared panel leaned on: being a publisher includes "reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or to withdraw from publication third-party content."

Critically, Barnes did not bar every claim in that case. The Ninth Circuit held that Section 230(c)(1) barred Barnes's negligent undertaking claim but not her promissory estoppel claim, because Yahoo had specifically promised one user that it would remove particular indecent profiles, and that one-time promise to a specific user fell outside Yahoo's ordinary publishing activity.

Calise v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-15910 (9th Cir. June 4, 2024), reported at 103 F.4th 732, extended that reasoning. There, users who said they had been scammed by Facebook advertisers pointed to Meta's Terms of Service promise to "[c]ombat harmful conduct," which the opinion describes as including the removal of any "content that purposefully deceives, willfully misrepresents or otherwise defrauds or exploits others for money or property." The Ninth Circuit held that the plaintiffs' contract claims were not barred by Section 230(c)(1) while their non-contract claims (unjust enrichment, negligence, and a state unfair competition claim) were, and it vacated and remanded as to the contract claims.

Calise also set out the two-step inquiry the Shared panel applied. First, what is the right from which the duty springs? If it springs from something separate from the defendant's status as a publisher, such as an agreement or an obligation the defendant has in a different capacity, Section 230(c)(1) does not apply. Second, what does the duty require the defendant to do? If it obliges the provider to monitor third-party content on pain of liability, the claim is barred.

Applying that framework, the Shared panel concluded that the right Shared invoked did not spring from anything separate from Meta's status as a publisher: a contractual promise that reiterates the company's inherent publishing authority still amounts to publishing activity protected by Section 230 (slip op. at 12). The opinion does not label that conclusion as a failure at a numbered step of the Calise inquiry, and it reached the test only after saying that even assuming Shared had an enforceable contractual right, Calise was of little help to it (slip op. at 11). Removing content and preventing someone from posting advertisements is, in the panel's words, "a quintessential editorial decision protected under Section 230" (slip op. at 10). The Ninth Circuit has previously treated advertising decisions as within the publisher function; Judge Berzon, concurring in Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 24-1672 (9th Cir. Apr. 28, 2026), wrote that Calise "concluded Meta's sales activities are captured by the term 'publisher.'"

For readers arriving from the defamation side of this question, the practical consequence of the publisher-or-speaker limitation is that the claim generally has to be aimed at the person who wrote the statement rather than at the service that carried it. That is the framing behind our state-by-state guide to libel and slander and behind the elements a defamation plaintiff has to prove. Obligations imposed directly on platforms are being litigated on a separate track, through transparency and disclosure statutes rather than through Section 230; the decision upholding New York's social media disclosure law is one example.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The narrow reading of this opinion is the correct one. The panel announced no new test, overruled nothing, and did not hold that contract claims against platforms are categorically barred. It applied the existing Barnes and Calise framework to one clause and found that this clause restated editorial discretion rather than promising something else.

What makes the opinion useful is where it locates the dividing line. After Calise, the obvious litigation strategy was to find any sentence in a platform's terms of service and plead around Section 230 by calling the dispute a contract dispute. This panel's answer is that the inquiry runs to the substance of the alleged duty, not the caption on the count. The opinion puts it plainly: "a claim does not automatically fall outside the ambit of Section 230's liability protection just because it is framed as a breach of contract." A court must instead evaluate whether the claim seeks to treat an interactive computer service as a publisher or speaker of third-party information, a task the panel says may include assessing the core theory of the complaint and the nature of the alleged injurious conduct (slip op. at 13 to 14).

Read alongside Calise and Barnes, the pattern turns on the subject matter of the promise. In Barnes, Yahoo made a specific commitment to a specific person. In Calise, Meta promised to combat fraud and deception, which this panel characterized as a business commitment to smoke out scammers rather than something sounding in editorial discretion (slip op. at 13). Here, the clause reserved Meta's own right to disable an account for breaching Community Standards. On the panel's reading, the first two are promises that happen to touch publication; the third is the publishing power itself, written down.

Two limits on how far this travels are worth naming. First, the panel's observation that Shared may not have had a viable contractual basis at all, because the clause gives Meta unilateral authority to determine breach, is an alternative ground the court did not need to reach and did not rely on. A future case with a clause drafted differently would not be answered by this opinion. Second, the decision came up on review of a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal, reviewed de novo, so it turns on what was pleaded. The panel pointed out that Shared's complaint did not reference any breached term or any promise, which is part of why the contract framing arrived too late to help.

Finally, this sits comfortably with the Ninth Circuit's August 10, 2026 holding in People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc. that Section 230 is a defense to liability rather than an immunity from suit. A defense can be adjudicated on the pleadings when the pleadings show the claim treats the provider as a publisher, which is what happened here. That characterization is our observation about how the two decisions fit together, not something either panel held.

How This Affects You

In general terms, and without reference to any individual situation: courts in the Ninth Circuit have held that a claim seeking to hold an interactive computer service liable for removing or declining to carry third-party content is barred by Section 230(c)(1), and that renaming such a claim as a breach of contract does not by itself change the answer. Courts in the Ninth Circuit have also held, in Barnes and Calise, that a claim resting on a promise that is genuinely separate from publishing decisions can survive Section 230.

Those two propositions sit on either side of a line that turns on the specific contractual language and the specific duty alleged, and both are matters of federal appellate precedent that a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction would have to apply to any particular set of facts. Where the underlying grievance is something a different user wrote rather than a platform decision, the analysis moves to state defamation law instead, which is the subject of our walkthrough of how a defamation case is actually brought.

What Happens Next

Judgment was entered October 30, 2026. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40(d)(1), any petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc must be filed within 14 days after entry of judgment unless the time is shortened or extended by order or local rule. The longer 45-day window in that rule applies only where one of the parties is the United States, a United States agency, or a United States officer or employee in the capacities the rule describes, and neither party here is. Counting from October 30, 2026, that 14-day period runs to November 13, 2026.

Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 41(b), the mandate must issue 7 days after the time to file a rehearing petition expires, or 7 days after entry of an order denying a timely petition or a motion to stay the mandate, whichever is later. Rule 41(d) separately allows a party to move to stay the mandate pending a certiorari petition.

The events that would make this news again are specific and dated: an amended or superseding opinion at docket No. 25-2612, an order granting panel rehearing or rehearing en banc, or a petition for certiorari. We take no position on whether any of those will happen. We will update this page if the Ninth Circuit's opinions database or the docket for No. 25-2612 shows any of them.

This article is information, not legal advice. It summarizes a published federal appellate decision and the statute and precedent it applies. It does not create an attorney-client relationship and it is not a substitute for advice from a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction about your own situation.

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• Ninth Circuit: Section 230 Is a Defense, Not Immunity From Suit
• Defamation Laws by State: Libel and Slander (2026)
• Elements of Defamation: What You Must Prove
• How to Sue for Defamation of Character (Step by Step)
• Federal Judge Upholds New York's Social Media Disclosure Law
• NY Appeals Court Tosses Google Review Defamation Suit, Awards Fees

Last updated: 2026-11-03. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-11-03.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Ninth Circuit rule that you can never sue a social media platform for breach of contract?

No. The panel applied Calise v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-15910 (9th Cir. June 4, 2024) as governing precedent and distinguished it on the content of the promise at issue (slip op. at 12 to 13). It did not purport to overrule or limit Calise, and a three-judge panel could not have done so. Calise held that the plaintiffs' contract claims were not barred by Section 230(c)(1) even though their non-contract claims were, and the Ninth Circuit vacated and remanded as to the contract claims. The Shared panel's point was narrower: a claim does not escape Section 230 merely because it is labeled a breach of contract, and the particular Terms of Service clause Shared invoked restated Meta's editorial discretion rather than creating a separate duty (slip op. at 12 to 14).

What exactly does Section 230(c)(1) say?

47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1) provides: 'No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.' Those limiting words matter. The provision does not grant blanket immunity from suit, and it is a separate provision from Section 230(c)(2), which addresses good-faith restriction of access to objectionable material.

Does this mean every account termination by a platform is protected by Section 230?

The opinion does not say that, and it should not be read that way. The panel held that Shared's claim was barred because it hinged on Meta's publishing authority, and that the clause Shared relied on was a restatement of that authority (slip op. at 12, 14). It did not hold that account termination is protected regardless of what was promised or what duty is alleged. Under the two-step inquiry from Calise, a duty that springs from something separate from the defendant's status as a publisher is outside Section 230(c)(1).

Does this ruling affect a defamation claim against the person who actually posted something?

No. Section 230(c)(1) addresses whether a provider or user of an interactive computer service can be treated as the publisher or speaker of information provided by another information content provider. It does not shield the author of the statement. This opinion concerned a conversion claim by a business against Meta over its own pages and says nothing about defamation elements or defenses.

Which courts are bound by this decision?

It is a published Ninth Circuit opinion, so it binds federal district courts within that circuit. 28 U.S.C. 41 lists the Ninth Circuit as comprising Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam and Hawaii. Courts outside the Ninth Circuit may find it persuasive but are not bound by it.

Is the opinion published, and is it citable?

Yes. The slip opinion is marked FOR PUBLICATION and was filed October 30, 2026 as No. 25-2612, with the opinion written by Judge Kenneth K. Lee and Judges Salvador Mendoza, Jr. and Ana de Alba on the panel. The Ninth Circuit's published-opinions database listed one opinion at that docket number and no amending order as of November 3, 2026.

What happened to Shared's other claims?

The opinion states that Shared sued Meta for, among other things, conversion and fraudulent inducement, and that the district court dismissed the conversion claim under Section 230 (slip op. at 8). The appeal and the opinion resolve only the conversion claim, and the opinion concludes, 'We AFFIRM the dismissal of the conversion claim' (slip op. at 14). The opinion does not state the disposition of the other claims, and we are not assuming one.