Detection case regarding Facebook plugin was rejected

Can you publish and use a Facebook plugin that removes all subscribers from a post at once without being prosecuted by the meta company? That question remains unanswered for now after U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley temporarily dismissed a declaratory motion to that effect Thursday. This was reported by the New York Times, citing court documents. Professor Ethan Zuckerman has filed a lawsuit to ensure that Meta Group, which owns social media platform Facebook, cannot sue him if it launches such a tool through which users can edit their own feeds.

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The case has a history: a few years ago, Louis Barclay from England came up with the idea of ​​​​developing such a plugin under the name Untrack Everything. However, in 2021, Meta Group threatened legal action if he published it, whereupon Barclay halted his project for fear of the consequences. But since the end of August, Professor Ethan Zuckerman, a communications researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has brought the issue back into focus and into a broader context: who actually has the power over social media content, who determines what gets what? Do we see it there?

CDA in terms of user?

To clarify this question, Zuckerman is getting support from the Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that advocates for free speech. Zuckerman and lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute rely on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and argue that the browser add-on makes you a provider of an interactive computer service. This will allow not only platform operators, but also users, to intervene in the news feed to prevent the spread of content considered offensive or malicious. On this basis, Zuckerman and the lawyers wanted to establish that they could not sue Meta if they developed and published such a tool. We detailed the content in the article Zuckerman v Zuckerberg: Facebook plugins sued.

Meta took action against the declaratory action and applied for the complete dismissal of the case. Judge Corley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has now granted the motion. But, According to the New York Times, He added that Zuckerman could reopen the case if such a tool were available.

“We are disappointed that the court believed that Professor Zuckerman should have coded the vehicle before accepting the case,” said Ramya Krishnan, one of Zuckerman’s attorneys. “We continue to believe that Section 230 generally protects enabling means and expect the court to provide assurance that it will consider this argument at a later date.”

A Meta spokesperson referred to an earlier statement from the company in which it described the lawsuit as “unfair.”

(dz)