Meta faces New York high court over 2022 Buffalo mass shooting that killed 10
New York's top court heard arguments on whether Meta bears liability for Payton Gendron's 2022 racially motivated supermarket shooting in Buffalo.
New York's top court weighs Meta's role in Buffalo supermarket shooting
New York's Court of Appeals heard more than two hours of oral arguments Tuesday on whether social media companies, including Meta, can be held liable for the 2022 mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people, Courthouse News Service reports.
The shooter, Payton Gendron, pleaded guilty in 2022 to targeting Black shoppers in a racially motivated attack. Attorneys representing the victims' families argued that Gendron had developed an addiction to social media platforms, where he consumed large quantities of alt-right content in isolation — a pattern documented in diary entries recovered after the shooting.
"Without the changes in his brain and his psychology caused by social media addiction, the shooting may not have happened," said Jennifer Bennett, an attorney for the plaintiffs, addressing the court's seven judges.
The families' legal theory rests on a distinction between the content Gendron consumed and the platforms' addictive design. Bennett and co-counsel Matthew Bergman argued that while Section 230 — a 1996 federal law — shields platforms from liability for user-generated content, it does not protect them from claims that their algorithms were negligently engineered to be addictive.
"The duty is to design a reasonably safe social media product," Bergman told the court.
Several judges signaled skepticism about that framing. Associate Judge Anthony Cannataro questioned whether platform addiction alone could bear causal weight in the shooting. "Surely every potential actor who's suffering from a social media addiction is not going to go out and perform a shooting based on some innocuous form of content," he said. "Someone who likes to watch tons and tons of travel videos, are they going to go out and commit a shooting just based solely on their addiction?"
Associate Judge Michael Garcia posed a similar challenge: "If somebody is addicted to cat videos, would they also be more likely to commit a shooting like this?"
Bennett maintained that addictive design and harmful content can operate in tandem — and that liability for the former does not require liability for the latter.
Meta attorney Eric Shumsky pushed back, arguing that the families' claims ultimately hinge on the substance of what Gendron watched, not the mechanics of how the platform kept him engaged — a distinction that, in his view, places the case squarely within Section 230's protections.
Shumsky also drew a broader historical line, noting that courts have repeatedly rejected attempts to hold new media formats liable for societal harm. "Theories like this are very, very old and they have always lost," he told the judges. "Plaintiffs have argued that every last type of media, including new technologies, are somehow so inherently harmful that they shouldn't get First Amendment protection. It was comic books, then it was music lyrics… then it was movies, then it was violent video games. At every single turn, courts have rejected that argument."
The case has moved through conflicting rulings in the New York court system. A trial-level court initially sided with the plaintiffs, finding that social media companies could be sued on an addiction theory. A mid-level appellate court reversed that decision in 2025, concluding that allowing the lower court's ruling to stand "would gut the immunity provisions of Section 230 and result in the end of the internet as we know it."
The Court of Appeals did not issue a ruling following Tuesday's arguments.
Gendron has been serving a life sentence since 2022 after pleading guilty to state charges including murder, domestic terrorism and hate crimes. He faces separate federal charges that carry the possibility of the death penalty; jury selection in that case is scheduled to begin in October.
Source: Courthouse News Service