Teatotaller cafe owner wins Instagram case in court

[cube00]

> Despite Facebook hiring several law firms to defend their case, Soldati, representing himself, was able to successfully argue Meta/Facebook committed a breach of contract and that they were not immune under the Communications Decency Act.

Very impressive going up against Meta's army of lawyers.

[silisili]

I don't get this. Why not pay an employee to take a few hours, ask a person from the necessary team to take a look, then call or write the complainant?

That -has- to be cheaper than getting all these lawyers involved over what was probably, as the article states, a glitch of some sort.

[rdtsc]

Once "legal" starts looking at it, it's in their hands, everyone except them and the executive team better step aside.

> In court, Soldati said Facebook attorneys were condescending and patronizing to him, but he took it seriously because it was his livelihood and because he thought that someone needed to fight them. He says it was “100%” worth it.

Condescending and patronizing sounds about right. "We went to Yale and Harvard, and now work for Meta, no puny coffee shop owner is going to oppose us! This should be a walk in the park". It's pretty glorious how they lost.

[irrational]

I’ve worked for the same Fortune 500 company for 20+ years. 99% of the time I have zero idea what team does what and whom I would even talk to find out. With nearly 100,000 employees and I have no idea how many thousands of departments and teams, I don’t think anyone really has the big picture of what everyone is doing.

[gumby]

I assume lots of glitches occur (after all they "move fast and break things") and feel if they engage with one they'll be required to engage with others. While if they just spend the effort to stonewall the few who complain they'll save money in the long run. They have billions of accounts, so what's a few to them?

[teeray]

That’s assuming you can even contact the necessary team. Usually your only recourse with FB is clicking through a support wizard and filling out a textbox. Then you get a final, unappealable judgement from an admin as a notification.

[ayoubd]

Agreed, it seems like a disproportionate response.

Handling the situation quietly when the court case was filed might have avoided this bad-for-Meta legal precedent. Taking it to trial seems like the most risky move, I'm interested if anyone can see Meta's legal logic here.

[aurareturn]

Because Meta has billions of users and they don’t have humans look at these cases. It’s all automated.

I lost my IG account multiple times due to using a VPN. I’m a normal user. Nothing malicious. Every support request is answered by only a robot.

[reactordev]

Meta’s help support is a bot. Theres no human. You can’t reach a human. The only recourse you have is what this man did.

[eek2121]

Big tech companies don't get big and stay big by hiring tons of humans to handle cases like these. Don't believe me? Try asking Google to fix a problem or Facebook or Twitter. (Apple is the exception, but they are much older and even they have issues)

[foobarian]

It's not apples to apples. You need to pay an employee to take a few hours to handle one complaint, multiplied by number of complaints. And this is more expensive than paying lawyers a much smaller number of times.

[hackernewds]

if you consider the scale of Meta, being international and all, it probably is not. I'm sure they've run the numbers. Think in expected values, since most won't sue.

[OkGoDoIt]

Sounds like Meta. I once had to solve a Facebook business page issue (another erroneous automated decision) that went unanswered for a year, and the only way I got it moving was to send a legal threat to Meta on a lawyer’s letterhead. Ended up solving the problem within a couple weeks.

[PakG1]

Sounds like a lot of online platforms.

[bomewish]

I don’t get this. There was no actual punishment for Facebook — so what will make them change their behaviour? Secondly, how can the lawyers just LIE and say he deleted his account when the company itself must have records of that. If they didn’t have the logs to prove it then they couldn’t have known he deleted it. If they did have logs they could have proven it. So they were lying. Why shouldn’t that be punished with a 100m fine or something utterly crazy? This is just bizarre every way you look at it.

[pliftkl]

Well, the punishment for Facebook is twofold: (A) they probably spent 10's of thousands on fighting this in court, and (B) it sets precedent that they are liable for this sort of thing. If they start getting sued regularly in jurisdictions all over the country, then the "pay expensive lawyers a lot a few times" vs "pay some humans to look at complaints many times" may start to come out in the consumer's favor.

[kibibu]

I'm not a lawyer or even from the US, but is it in the power of small claims to impose a 100m fine??

[m3kw9]

When lawyers are asked who are paid thousands an hour they would gladly go ten years at it.

[jackvalentine]

Yes that’s why you have internal counsel that are paid a salary - to make sure external lawyers who charge for every single 6 minute block don’t run away with it because they can.

[djbusby]

Hmm. I have a squatter on an FB name for my trademark company name.

Back in ~2006 I had a similar issue. I submitted a request to FB and I got the Page and URL. In 2019, with similar trademark issue I was rejected. This reads like I should escalate, outside of technical channels, to claim our rightfully owned name on their platform.

[jimmySixDOF]

So now it's right on to a woldwide class action with all the claimants who went through the process of loosing an account with all the lost media and history and emotional damages due to "computer says No" ? I know a few people who would love to jump on that.

[pdonis]

Only for paying customers, since the fact that the cafe owner had paid for business-related services was part of what won him the lawsuit.

[dataflow]

Could someone ELI5 this to me?

The judge found:

> The defendant provided two conflicting reasons for the deletion

Isn't this lying under oath? How is it not perjury?

[nraynaud]

Not sure small claim uses all this machinery.

[mmvasq]

Need to talk with this guy. They had the audacity to disable my sister’s privacy takeout so you could not see who was manipulating both her and I. Someone did a real number on her account.

[Animats]

Who will sue next?

This could turn into a mini-industry.

[joecool1029]

https://archive.is/4vb8K

[kazinator]

> Soldati’s win wasn’t just a win for him, he said, but a win for all Instagram users and small business owners who have faced similar problems with the tech company.

This is just boilerplate nonsense used in every story like this.

It is false. It was purely just a win for him. Anyone else wanting to sue Meta over a deleted account will have to go through almost exactly the same thing.

The fact that Soldati may have set a precedent will at best only be a minor optimization in the entire bureaucratic mess.

[eek2121]

This shows you have no idea how the US court system works.

Meta's defeat leads to a build up of case law, making it harder for meta and similar companies to win unlike class action lawsuits, which lead to nothing.

It does take time for these cases to build up the appeals process and such, but it does get there.

In short, he does win in the short term, but everyone wins in the long term.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> Meta also argued it was immune to any cases brought against them under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which is often used to obtain immunity from claims involving the publishing or deletion of material on its platforms.

A crack in Section 230. Nice!

[gumby]

A crack in Section 230 would be disastrous.

But this doesn't look like a crack at all, and IG never tried to claim that they had deliberately chosen to delete the account. That might even have pushed it under Section 230!

[latchkey]

"In court, Soldati said Facebook attorneys were condescending and patronizing to him, but he took it seriously because it was his livelihood and because he thought that someone needed to fight them. He says it was “100%” worth it.

Gary Burt, a Manchester lawyer who represented Meta in the New Hampshire Supreme Court as well as the Dover District Court, did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story."

So I looked him up and he looks like an affable chap. /s

https://www.primmer.com/attorney/gary-m.-burt

[mthoms]

Yeah, he looks really friendly.

According to that page, he has defended both a "landlord in a million dollar lead paint claim" and an "oil delivery company against a million dollar pollution claim".

I'm sure he's a lovely person though.

[karlshea]

Was fun to see a “VCard” link, haven’t even heard that word in like 15 years.