Reported / Citable
Background
Shared Partnership had built a Facebook audience of roughly 25 million people at its peak. The Canadian company used eye-catching ads to draw readers to its content. In October 2020, after more than a decade on the platform, Meta took down Shared’s pages for repeated policy violations. Shared said that losing the pages destroyed the business it had built around them. The legal question was whether it could recover from Meta for exercising control over pages it said belonged to Shared.
Shared submitted more than 500,000 ads through Meta’s self-service system. Most ran; Meta rejected more than 18,000. An advertiser could edit a rejected ad or appeal, and paid only for ads that actually ran. Shared wanted more specific explanations for rejections. But the dispute that reached the appeals court in this published opinion concerned the removal of the pages themselves. Shared alleged conversion, a California claim for wrongful interference with someone else’s property. The federal district court in San Francisco dismissed that claim.
The Court’s Holding
The Ninth Circuit affirmed. Section 230(c)(1) generally prevents a plaintiff from holding an interactive computer service liable as the publisher of content supplied by someone else. Shared did not dispute that Meta operated such a service or that Shared supplied the content. The disputed point was what Shared wanted the court to hold Meta liable for. Its complaint identified the removal of its pages as the wrongful act. Choosing whether to continue displaying those pages was an editorial decision, even though Shared described its interest in them as property.
On appeal, Shared argued that Meta had promised to leave its account alone unless Shared clearly, seriously, or repeatedly violated the platform’s rules. The panel looked at who got to make that determination. The terms reserved that judgment to Meta and authorized it to suspend or disable an account. Shared’s complaint had identified no specific promise that Meta broke. Even assuming an enforceable contractual right, the duty Shared asserted still amounted to a requirement that Meta keep publishing its content.
Key Takeaways
- A court looks at the act alleged to be wrongful. Here it was the decision to stop displaying someone else’s pages. Changing the legal label from conversion to contract did not change what Meta would have had to do to avoid liability.
- The exact promise matters. In Barnes v. Yahoo!, a platform made a specific commitment to an individual to remove particular photographs. Shared identified no comparable undertaking to keep its pages available.
- A platform-wide agreement can contain an independent promise. In Calise v. Meta Platforms, the plaintiffs invoked a commitment to combat fraudulent advertising. The panel distinguished that business commitment from the clause reserving Meta’s discretion over account access here.
Why It Matters
For a business that buys advertising and cultivates an audience on the same service, the two relationships can feel inseparable. This opinion shows why the distinction matters. Shared’s advertising history explained the financial stakes, but the claim before the panel did not seek a refund for an ad that never ran. It sought to impose liability for removing the pages. The court therefore did not need to decide whether businesses generally own their social-media pages or whether every promise in an advertising agreement is enforceable.
The practical question is what performance the platform actually undertook. An express commitment to a customer may support a different claim from a general policy describing when the service may remove content. The published decision resolves the conversion claim on that distinction; it does not give platforms blanket protection against liability for their own promises.