Malana Pinckney was 6 years-old when she hid with her mother beneath a church office desk, as a hail of bullets just outside the door killed her father, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and eight Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church 10 years ago.
Malana’s mother, Jennifer Pinckney, filed a civil lawsuit on her behalf in 2022 alleging Meta, the owner of Facebook, helped radicalize the gunman, a self-proclaimed white supremacist.
Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the family’s appeal.
In February, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's dismissal of the case citing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects social media.
Pinckney’s lawsuit alleged Facebook’s algorithms feed extreme content to people who seek it and will be most affected, like the gunman who had hoped to start a race war by killing nine Black parishioners during bible study at an historic Charleston church.
The high court’s refusal to weigh in means the 1996 act will not be challenged. Critics have argued that it gives tech firms broad immunity at a time when young people are being harmed by social media.
The justices did not give a reason for not hearing the Pinckney family's appeal. But that is customary.
