“We’re disappointed the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the court resolves the case,” attorney Ramya Krishnan said in a statement. “We continue to believe that Section 230 protects user-empowering tools, and look forward to the court considering that argument at a later time.”
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against Meta by a University of Massachusetts professor, who had argued that social media users have a right to build and use external tools to take control of their home feeds.
As LegalReader.com has reported before, the complaint was filed on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst campus.
Zuckerman, who had proposed developing an extension that would let Facebook users “unfollow” everyone in their feed, claimed that Facebook threatened to sue him if he released his tool.
The lawsuit was unusual in its attempt to leverage Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that companies like Meta regularly use to shield themselves from lawsuits related to user-posted content.
“I see and appreciate the elegance of trying to use a piece of law that has made user-generated content possible, to now give users more control over these experiences and services,” Zuckerman said in an August statement.
The New York Times notes that Zuckerman is not the first person to have run afoul of Meta for trying to give consumers more control over their user experience. In 2021, another developer publicly released software that let Facebook users “purge” their feeds—prompting Facebook to threaten legal action.
Zuckerman claims that similar software, including his, is protected by Section 230, which permits companies to restrict access to user-created content that is obscene, violent, or otherwise problematic.
Although this language is used to justify companies’ social media moderation policies, Zuckerman says that it gives users a right to remove content that they, personally, find objectionable.
Meta, and its attorneys, have long maintained that Zuckerman’s premise is inherently flawed.
“This suit is baseless, and was filed by the plaintiff over a hypothetical browser extension that he has not even built,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
On Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted Meta’s motion for a dismissal. In her ruling, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley indicated that Zuckerman’s extension does not even appear to have been coded—meaning that it is not yet in a state to be released to, or used by, consumers.
“We’re disappointed the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the court resolves the case,” attorney Ramya Krishnan said in a statement. “We continue to believe that Section 230 protects user-empowering tools, and look forward to the court considering that argument at a later time.”
Sources
How a Law That Shields Big Tech Is Now Being Used Against It
Lawsuit against Meta asks if Facebook users have right to control their feeds using external tools
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