Order Denying Motion for Leave to Amend the Complaint — Hart v. Facebook (N.D. Cal.)

Record facts

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division · No. 3:22-cv-00737-CRB · Doc. 127 · 2023-05-09 · Docket on CourtListener

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United States District Court 
Northern District of California
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA 
JUSTIN HART, 
Plaintiff, 
v. 
FACEBOOK INC., et al., 
Defendants. 
Case No. 22-cv-737-CRB   
ORDER DENYING MOTION 
FOR LEAVE TO AMEND THE 
COMPLAINT 
Over a year ago, the Court dismissed Plaintiff Justin Hart’s case because his 
complaint (1) failed to state a First Amendment claim against Facebook and Twitter and 
(2) failed to satisfy the causation and redressability elements of standing over the claims 
against the Federal Defendants.  Now, armed with the government’s production in 
response to his FOIA request, discovery from a similar case, and the so-called “Twitter 
Files,” Hart seeks to revive his suit and amend his complaint, saying new information from 
these sources fixes the deficiencies that initially doomed his case.   
Hart is wrong.  His new allegations do not support his federal claim.  The filing of 
an amended complaint would thus be futile.  Finding oral argument unnecessary, the Court 
DENIES the motion for leave to amend the complaint. 
I.
BACKGROUND1
In August 2021, Hart filed suit against Facebook and Twitter (“Social Media
1 Because the parties are familiar with the facts of this case, this section provides only a 
recap.  For more details, the Court’s prior opinion on dismissal is reported at Hart v. 
Facebook Inc., 2022 WL 1427507, at *1 (N.D. Cal. May 5, 2022). 
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Defendants”), as well as President Joe Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the U.S. 
Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget 
(“Federal Defendants”).  Compl. ¶¶ 13–18 (dkt. 1).  Hart asserted that the Defendants 
violated, among other things, his First Amendment rights when Facebook and Twitter 
removed his posts claiming “Covid is almost gone in America,” “Masking Children is 
Impractical and Not Backed by Research or Real World Data,” and “masks don’t protect 
you.”  See Or. Granting Mot. to Dismiss (“Or.”), at 3–5 (dkt. 87).  Facebook also restricted 
Hart from posting on his page for three days, and Twitter temporarily locked his account.  
Id. 
In May 2022, the Court granted the Defendants’ motions to dismiss without leave to 
amend.  Id. at 18.  The Court found that Hart could not establish Article III standing over 
the Federal Defendants, and the complaint failed to state a claim for relief on the merits.  
Id. at 9–18.  Specifically, the complaint did not support theories of joint action between the 
Federal Defendants and the social media companies and showed no signals of government 
coercion.  Id. at 18.  Hart primarily relied on and referenced a hodgepodge of statements 
made by the Federal Defendants at various times and policies enacted by the Social Media 
Defendants that occurred before the Biden Administration.  See id. at 9–14.  Nonetheless, 
recognizing that Hart had a pending FOIA request that sought potentially relevant 
information on the Federal Defendants’ supposed communications with Facebook and 
Twitter, the Court left open the possibility for Hart to amend his case if the eventual FOIA 
productions reveal facts that “plausibly suggest that ‘the [Government] has so far 
insinuated itself into a position of interdependence with [Facebook and Twitter] that it 
must be recognized as a joint participant’ in enforcing their company policies.”  Id.  The 
Court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over Hart’s state law claims against 
Facebook and Twitter.  Id. at 15.   
After receiving the FOIA productions, in February 2023, Hart filed the instant 
motion to amend along with a proposed amended complaint.  Mot. to Amend (dkt. 112); 
Proposed Am. Compl. (“PAC”) (dkt. 112-1).  The proposed amended complaint includes 
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new allegations that the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (“CDC”) informed 
Facebook to be on the lookout for misinformation about COVID and COVID vaccines, see 
PAC ¶¶ 45–50; email communications between the Surgeon General and Facebook where 
Facebook said it shared the government’s goal of removing harmful misinformation about 
COVID vaccinations and updated the Surgeon General of Facebook’s efforts to combat 
misinformation, id. ¶¶ 72–86; and emails showing that Facebook offered the CDC a $15 
million ad credit for public health messaging, id. ¶¶ 39–40.   
In addition to citing the FOIA materials, Hart also references the deposition of 
CDC’s Director of Digital Media Carol Crawford and emails involving Deputy Assistant 
to the President Robert Flaherty, then-White House Senior Advisor Andy Slavitt and 
Facebook.  These were obtained as part of the discovery in Missouri v. Biden, No. 22-cv-
1213 (W.D. La. Oct. 6, 2022), where two states and five individuals allege that the 
President and other federal officials and agencies are violating the First Amendment by 
coercing social-media platforms to censor disfavored speech.  Crawford testified about, 
among other things, the be-on-the-lookout meetings with social media companies, and 
Flaherty and Slavitt emailed Facebook about a Washington Post article titled, “Massive 
Facebook study on users’ doubt in vaccines finds a small group appears to play a big role 
in pushing the skepticism.”  Pl.’s Ex. 15 (dkt. 112-2 at 540).  Hart seeks to add Crawford 
and Slavitt as defendants in this case.  PAC ¶¶ 29–30. 
Finally, based on the so-called “Twitter Files” released by Twitter’s new owner, 
Hart alleges that on September 3, 2021, Scott Gottlieb, a board member at Pfizer and a 
former FDA Commissioner who resigned in 2019—i.e., before the pandemic—wrote to 
Twitter complaining about one of Hart’s posts.  Id. ¶ 155.2  
2 Hart’s request for judicial notice that the Federal Government can intervene with 
Twitter’s algorithm code (dkt. 120) is DENIED.  Hart bases this assertion on a third 
party’s random tweet claiming that “[w]hen needed, the government can intervene with the 
Twitter algorithm.” RJN at 4.  The Court can only note that this tweet exists, but it cannot 
take judicial notice of the truth of its content.  See Threshold Enters. Ltd. v. Pressed 
Juicery, Inc., 445 F. Supp. 3d 139, 146 (N.D. Cal. 2020).  Moreover, this tweet is 
irrelevant to whether the Defendants engaged in joint action and whether the government 
coerced the Social Media Defendants into removing Hart’s posts. 
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II. 
DISCUSSION 
It is well-established that “[l]eave to amend may be denied if the proposed 
amendment is futile or would be subject to dismissal.”  Wheeler v. City of Santa Clara, 
894 F.3d 1046, 1059 (9th Cir. 2018).  That is, if a “plaintiff’s proposed amendments would 
fail to cure the pleading deficiencies identified by the district court,” the court may dismiss 
the suit without leave.  Cervantes v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., 656 F.3d 1034, 1041 
(9th Cir. 2011); Nunes v. Ashcroft, 375 F.3d 805, 808 (9th Cir. 2004) (“Futility alone can 
justify the denial of a motion for leave to amend.”).  Here, Hart’s motion to amend is 
denied because his new allegations do not support his First Amendment claim.    
When the Court dismissed Hart’s original complaint, it left opened the narrow 
possibility for Hart to amend his complaint only if new allegations from the then-pending 
FOIA productions “plausibly suggest that ‘the [Government] has so far insinuated itself 
into a position of interdependence with [Facebook and Twitter] that it must be recognized 
as a joint participant’ in enforcing their company policies.”  Or. at 18 (quoting Gorenc v. 
Salt River Agric. Improvement & Power Dist., 869 F.2d 503, 507 (9th Cir. 1989)).3  To 
satisfy this requirement, the plaintiff must show that the state actor participated with the 
private party in taking a particular action.  Id. at 12–14.  Put differently, the plaintiff must 
show that the government was responsible for specific private conduct such that it 
“dictate[d] the decision” made “in [that] particular case.”  Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 
1010 (1982); id. at 1004–05 (“Mere approval of or acquiescence in the initiatives of a 
private party is not sufficient to justify holding the State responsible for those initiatives.”). 
Hart’s new allegations fall far short of meeting this demanding standard.  Among 
the newly discovered information, the lone mention of Hart is from the “Twitter Files,” 
which shows that in September 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who is on Pfizer’s board of 
 
3 To be sure, in last year’s dismissal order, the Court said that Hart could amend his 
complaint only if the government’s FOIA productions revealed facts that plausibly support 
an allegation of “joint action” between the government and the Social Media Defendants to 
moderate Hart’s social media posts.  Or. at 18.  His motion now relies on materials that are 
not exclusively from the FOIA productions.  Nonetheless, his new allegations—regardless 
of where he got them from—cannot save his case. 
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directors and who served as FDA Commissioner until 2019 (i.e., before the pandemic), 
complained about Hart’s posts to a Twitter lobbyist.  PAC ¶ 155.  Hart argues that he “was 
on Dr. Scott Gottlieb’s radar as a target.”  Reply at 6.  But Dr. Gottlieb was not serving in 
the government when Hart posted his challenged statements.  That means Dr. Gottlieb was 
acting as a private individual when he complained to Twitter about Hart.  Cf. Marsh v. Cty. 
of San Diego, 680 F.3d 1148, 1158 (9th Cir. 2012) (“actions of a former government 
employee, without more, cannot amount to state action”).  Without more, Hart cannot link 
the conduct of a private individual to the government.     
Hart’s other newly added allegations similarly do not establish joint action or 
government coercion.  That government officials asked Facebook and Twitter to generally 
be on the lookout for COVID-related misinformation and contacted the platforms about the 
prevalence of misinformation do not show that the government exercised dominant control 
over the social media companies’ action in temporarily restricting Hart’s accounts.  See, 
e.g., Atkinson v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2021 WL 5447022, at *1 (9th Cir. Nov. 22, 2021) 
(responding to “unsolicited inquiries does not plausibly allege such a degree of 
‘interdependence that the state must be recognized as a joint participant’”) (quoting Tsao v. 
Desert Place, Inc., 698 F.3d 1128, 1140 (9th Cir. 2012)); Informed Consent Action 
Network v. YouTube LLC, 582 F. Supp. 3d 712, 719 (N.D. Cal. 2022) (“statements by 
members of Congress urging [social media] Defendants to take action” are not “sufficient 
to show that the Government was a ‘joint participant in the challenged activity’”).  And 
that Facebook offered the government $15 million in ad credit for public health messaging 
is wholly irrelevant to Facebook’s decision to remove Hart’s challenged posts. 
Finally, Hart argues that Crawford from the CDC “testified that the federal 
government had insinuated itself into a position of interdependence with the Social Media 
Defendants by holding regular [Be on the Lookout] meetings to assist them with 
implementing their misinformation policies.”  PAC ¶ 136.  This argument is illustrative of 
the type of “legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation” that courts reject at the 
pleading stage.  See Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 1949–50 (2009) (“[C]onclusory 
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allegations of law and unwarranted inferences are insufficient to defeat a motion to dismiss 
for failure to state a claim.”).  In any event, Hart misconstrues Crawford’s testimony.  
Crawford testified that the CDC held only two be-on-the-lookout meetings with social 
media companies, Pl.’s Ex. 14 (dkt. 112-2), at 400; that Twitter made its own content-
moderation decisions “based on whatever policy they had,” id. at 413; and that the CDC 
“did not discuss the development of [content-moderation] policies, or the enforcement of 
[those] policies” with the companies, id. at 307.  Thus, contrary to Hart’s argument, 
Crawford’s deposition testimony from Missouri does not show that the Federal Defendants 
exerted control over social media companies or that the Federal Defendants and the Social 
Media Defendants had “a meeting of the minds to violate constitutional rights.”  See 
O’Handley v. Weber, 62 F.4th 1145, 1159 (9th Cir. 2023); see also Or. at 13 (“The one-
way communication alleged here falls far short of ‘substantial cooperation.’”). 
Although Hart argues that the Social Media Defendants aligned their policies and 
algorithms to the government’s goal of targeting misinformation, see Mot. at 4, this does 
not support a First Amendment claim: “There is nothing wrongful about [Facebook and] 
Twitter’s desire to uphold the integrity” on their platforms. See O’Handley, 62 F.4th at 
1159.  Again, there is no plausible indication from the proposed complaint that the Federal 
Defendants have “significantly involve[d] [themselves] in the private parties’ actions and 
decisionmaking.”  Id.; see also id. at 1160 (noting “[t]his test is intentionally demanding 
and requires a high degree of cooperation between private parties and state officials to rise 
to the level of state action”).   
Accordingly, Hart’s motion to amend fails on futility grounds.  See, e.g., Children’s 
Health Defense v. Facebook, Inc., 546 F. Supp. 3d 909, 931 (N.D. Cal. 2021) (holding that 
plaintiff’s threadbare allegations that Facebook and the government were “working 
together” to “promote universal vaccination” were insufficient to allege joint action where 
the plaintiff failed “to allege specific facts establishing the agreement or a meeting of the 
minds relating to Facebook’s deletion of [the plaintiff]’s Facebook page”); Federal Agency 
of News LLC v. Facebook, Inc., 432 F. Supp. 3d 1107, 1125 (N.D. Cal. 2020) (same). 
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III.
CONCLUSION
 
Hart’s motion for leave to amend the complaint is DENIED.  The case is dismissed 
with prejudice.
IT IS SO ORDERED. 
Dated: May 9, 2023 
CHARLES R. BREYER 
United States District Judge 
Case 3:22-cv-00737-CRB   Document 127   Filed 05/09/23   Page 7 of 7

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