Plaintiffs argued before the Ninth Circuit that the lower court erred in finding Rohingya women fleeing genocide in Myanmar should have known of Meta's role in the attacks and investigated it before 2021.
Law360 (December 4, 2024, 11:11 PM EST) -- Ninth Circuit judges doubted Wednesday whether women fleeing genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar could have realistically investigated Facebook's role in spreading disinformation and called a lawyer, with one judge calling the defense argument "silly" and another judge responding, "yeah right."
The judges' comments came during an hourlong hearing before a three-judge panel on an appeal of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' January ruling that dismissed the case for being time-barred by a two-year statute of limitation.
According to the trial judge, the two-year statute of limitation purportedly began in 2012 when Myanmar's government forces attacked plaintiff Jane Doe 1's village, and then in 2017 when the military attacked Jane Doe 2's village. However, the pair didn't file their proposed class action seeking to hold Meta Platforms Inc. liable for spreading anti-Rohingya hate speech and inciting violence until 2021.
The 2012 attack culminated in the deaths of more than 50 Rohingya people and the displacement of 140,000 during riots following the attacks, and the 2017 attacks — dubbed a "clearance operation" by the Myanmar military — resulted in at least 8,170 deaths and caused hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people to flee the country, according to court documents.
In her ruling, Judge Gonzalez Rogers found that the Jane Doe plaintiffs had failed to investigate Meta's role in the attacks, and therefore they failed to invoke California's discovery rule to toll the two-year statute of limitation.
But during the hearing Wednesday, Roger Perlstadt of Edelson PC, who represents the plaintiffs, argued that the lower court erred by concluding that the plaintiffs were on notice of Meta's role in the attacks and could have investigated them sooner than 2021.
He noted that his clients can't read or write and didn't learn of Meta's purported role in spreading misinformation until attorneys approached them. One plaintiff spent years living in a refugee camp and the other eventually immigrated to the United States, and they couldn't have known to investigate Meta's alleged role in the attacks even if it had been reported in news outlets, he said. Read more.