Declaratory judgment action over Facebook plug-in dismissed

Can you publish and use a Facebook plugin that removes all subscribers to a feed at once without being legally prosecuted by the meta company? This question remains unanswered for the time being after US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley provisionally dismissed a declaratory action to this effect on Thursday. This was reported by the New York Times, citing court documents. Professor Ethan Zuckerman filed the lawsuit to ensure that the Meta Group, owner of the social media platform Facebook, could not sue him if it brought such a tool onto the market so that users could edit their own feeds.

The case has a history: several years ago, Louis Barclay from the UK came up with the idea of developing such a plug-in under the name Unfollow Everything. But in 2021, the Meta Group threatened him with legal action if he published it, whereupon Barclay stopped his project for fear of consequences. However, since the end of August, Professor Ethan Zuckerman, a communications researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has brought the topic back into focus and into a wider context: who actually has the power of disposition over social media content, who determines what we see there?

The CDA in the sense of the users?

In clarifying this question, Zuckerman is receiving support from the Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that advocates for freedom of speech. Zuckerman and the lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute are relying on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and arguing that the browser plug-in makes you the provider of an interactive computer service. This would allow not only platform operators to intervene in the newsfeed, but also users, in order to prevent the dissemination of content deemed offensive or malicious. On this basis, Zuckerman and lawyers wanted to establish that they could not prosecute Meta if they developed and published such a tool. We have described the context in detail in the article Zuckerman v Zuckerberg: Right to Facebook plugins sued for.

Meta took action against the declaratory action and applied for it to be dismissed in its entirety. Judge Corley of the US District Court for the Northern District of California has now granted the motion. However, according to the New York Times, she added that Zuckerman could re-file the lawsuit if such a tool was available.

"We are disappointed that the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the court takes the case," said Ramya Krishnan, one of Zuckerman's attorneys. "We continue to believe that Section 230 generally protects enablement tools and look forward to the court's 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 "without merit".

(dz)