Patterson v. Meta: Is a Social Media App a Product?

On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, the New York Court of Appeals will hear argument in Patterson v Meta Platforms and three companion appeals. The plaintiffs are families of the ten people murdered at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, and survivors of the attack. The defendants they are still fighting to keep in the case are Meta, Instagram, Snap, Google and YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Twitch, Amazon and 4chan. The question the state’s highest court has agreed to decide is one I get asked in my office more often every year: can a social media platform be treated as a defective product under New York law, or does federal law close that door before it opens?

I handle personal injury cases, including claims that a product was badly designed. This is the argument as I read it, what each side has to win, and what the answer will mean for a New York family that believes an app hurt their child.

What the families allege

The complaints do not claim that a post was defamatory or that a video was illegal. They claim that the platforms were engineered to be addictive, that the recommendation algorithms fed an eighteen-year-old an escalating diet of racist and violent material because it kept him engaged, and that the companies knew the design did this and shipped it anyway. The legal theories are the familiar ones from any defective product case: design defect, failure to warn, negligence. The alternative designs the plaintiffs describe are also familiar to anyone who has argued a design case: no autoplay, a feed with an end, real parental controls, session limits, easy account deletion.

Justice Paula Feroleto in Erie County denied the platforms’ motions to dismiss in 2024. She treated the allegations as design claims, not content claims, and said the Section 230 arguments “may ultimately prove true” but could not be resolved on the pleadings.

What the Fourth Department held

On July 25, 2025, a divided panel reversed as to the social media defendants. The majority’s reasoning had three layers, and the Court of Appeals has agreed to review all three.

Section 230. The federal Communications Decency Act says a website is not treated as the publisher of content posted by its users. The majority read the complaints as depending entirely on that content: the shooter was not radicalized by an infinite scroll of cooking videos, so the theory of harm is “inextricably intertwined” with the platforms’ role as publishers. The majority said flatly that there is no strict products liability exception to Section 230, and rejected the Third Circuit’s view in Anderson v TikTok that an algorithm’s recommendations are the platform’s own speech rather than third-party content.

The First Amendment. The majority added a second lock on the same door. Citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moody v NetChoice, it held that choosing and ranking content is editorial judgment protected by the First Amendment, even when an algorithm does the choosing. The opinion put it as a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition for the platforms: either the algorithm is publishing third-party content and Section 230 applies, or it is the platform’s own expression and the First Amendment applies. In the majority’s view they are protected by both and “under no circumstances” by neither.

Products and causation. The majority also concluded that the platforms are not products for purposes of strict products liability, and said that even a pure addiction theory would fail on causation because a mass murder is an intervening criminal act that breaks the chain.

The two dissenting justices saw a different case. They read the complaints as targeting conduct, not content: features like autoplay, an endless feed, push notifications and the absence of parental controls are design choices that would be defective whether the content was hate speech or cat videos. In their view those features are the platform’s own creation, not third-party speech, so Section 230 does not apply, and a company that manufactures and distributes a uniform product to millions of users can be held to the same design-defect standard as any other manufacturer. Because two justices dissented on a question of law, the families had a right to appeal to the Court of Appeals without asking permission, and that is how the case reached Albany.

Why the “product” question matters so much in New York

New York’s products liability law is court-made and old. A manufacturer is strictly liable for a design defect when the product, as designed, was not reasonably safe and a safer alternative design was feasible. The test comes from Voss v Black & Decker and it has been applied to cars, saws, ladders and drugs for fifty years. It has never been squarely applied by the Court of Appeals to software, let alone to a free app whose “user” is also its raw material.

If the Court holds that a platform can be a product, three things follow for a New York plaintiff. The design-defect framework applies, with its focus on feasible alternatives, which is exactly what the plaintiffs pleaded. The claim can be tried in a New York Supreme Court rather than folded into the federal multidistrict litigation in California. And discovery into how the features were designed and tested, the internal research that has surfaced in other cases, becomes available under New York’s broad disclosure rules.

If the Court holds that a platform is not a product, the design theory does not disappear, but it becomes an ordinary negligence claim, and ordinary negligence against a platform runs straight back into Section 230 and the First Amendment analysis the majority adopted.

What each side has to win

The families’ cleanest path is the dissent’s framing: keep the case about features, not feeds. Their difficulty is the Buffalo record itself. The Fourth Department majority was right that these complaints describe the specific racist content the shooter consumed, because that is the true story of what happened. A design-only complaint about a child who lost sleep and developed an eating disorder is easier to keep clear of Section 230 than a complaint about a man who was radicalized by what he read. The argument on Tuesday will show whether the Court is willing to separate the theory from the facts of this particular tragedy.

The platforms’ cleanest path is Moody. If curation by algorithm is protected expression, the product label does not matter, because a state cannot impose tort liability for protected speech. Their difficulty is that the Supreme Court in Moody was talking about government laws that force platforms to carry speech, and the dissent below drew that line sharply: a private tort claim about an addictive design is “a far cry” from a state statute about content moderation.

Watch for questions about causation. Even a Court inclined to let design claims proceed may hold that this shooting, with its intervening criminal act, is not the case to do it with.

What this means for a New York family today

Cases against the platforms brought by school districts, parents and young adults are already pending in New York courts and in the federal multidistrict litigation, where a federal judge in California allowed several design-based claims to proceed in 2023 while dismissing content-based ones. Our parents’ guide to social media harm lawsuits covers who can sue and what the claims look like, and our note on the first bellwether trial in the federal MDL covers the federal side. A ruling for the families in Patterson would make the state court route viable for New Yorkers. A ruling against them would channel New York claims into the federal case.

If you believe an app injured your child, the answer in Patterson does not change three things you should do now. Preserve the account data, the screen-time records and the device; that evidence disappears with a factory reset. Get the diagnosis documented by a treating clinician, because the medical causation question is where these cases are actually won or lost. And do not wait for Albany: the statute of limitations on a personal injury claim in New York is three years, and for a minor it runs from the eighteenth birthday, but the evidence does not wait for anyone. Our product liability practice handles design-defect claims, and a consultation is free.

Timeline

FAQ

What is Patterson v. Meta about? Whether families of the victims of the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting can sue social media companies under New York products liability law for designing addictive platforms whose algorithms radicalized the shooter. The Appellate Division dismissed those claims in 2025; the Court of Appeals hears the appeal on September 15, 2026.

Is a social media platform a “product” under New York law? That is the question. The Fourth Department majority said no. Two dissenting justices said a platform manufactured and distributed uniformly to millions of users is a product like any other, and its design features can be defective.

What is Section 230? A 1996 federal statute that says a website is not the publisher of content its users post. The majority below held that the families’ claims depend on that content and are therefore barred; the dissent held that claims about design features do not implicate Section 230 at all.

Does the First Amendment protect an algorithm? The majority held yes, relying on the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moody v NetChoice: ranking and recommending content is editorial judgment. The dissent read Moody as a case about government content-moderation laws, not private tort claims.

Why did the case go straight to the Court of Appeals? Because two justices dissented on a question of law, the plaintiffs could appeal as of right under CPLR 5601 without seeking permission.

What happens to other New York social media cases? If the families win, design-defect claims against platforms can proceed in New York state courts. If the platforms win, those claims are effectively limited to the federal multidistrict litigation in California, where a federal judge has allowed some design-based claims to proceed.

When will the Court decide? Most Court of Appeals decisions issue within a few months of argument, so a ruling is likely by early 2027.

What should a parent do now? Preserve the child’s device and account data, get any diagnosis documented by a treating provider, and get advice before the three-year limitations period runs. For a minor, the clock generally starts at eighteen, but evidence does not wait.

Sources

• Patterson v Meta Platforms, Inc., 2025 NY Slip Op 04446 (4th Dept July 25, 2025), incorporating the memorandum in Salter v Meta Platforms, Inc.
• Court of Appeals, Case Issue Statements, September 2026 (Patterson v Meta Platforms and related appeals, Nos. 68 to 71)
• Eric Goldman, “Social Media Services Aren’t Liable for Buffalo Mass-Shooting,” Technology & Marketing Law Blog (July 28, 2025), quoting the majority and dissent
• Moody v NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024)

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Whatever the Court decides, the families in Buffalo have already forced the question that every state court will eventually have to answer. Whether the thing in a teenager’s hand at 2 a.m. is speech or a machine is not an abstraction to the people who have to live with what it did.

Call 516-750-0595 or request a free case review if you believe a social media platform’s design injured you or your child.