> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m just imagining going up to somebody in the c-suite and telling them what team I work for and what I do. I guarantee they would have no idea we exist. I once sat next to the manager who is three levels above me at a lunch meeting. She had zero idea who my team was or what we did.
I think Leo de Moura was at Microsoft at the time when he was developing the Lean proof assistant. He once commented that he was fairly sure the CEO did not know the language existed or that it was being developed within MS. I found that pretty funny, and probably entirely accurate!
Probably not what you are looking for, but … management? In old school firms most managers have followed a career path over different departments, learning the ropes and multiple aspects of the business and often company, building a network while growing as a person and in scale/scope. They are supposed to be able to build bridges and transcend the petty politics between teams in order to get things moving.
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?
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.
I'm reading as why did Meta not pay its employees internally to resolve this matter instead of paying attorneys to litigate this case. The assumption being that an employee is already on the payroll so just give them an assignment instead of giving money to lawyers.
I'm guessing their arrogance told them they'd never lose the case and it would be worth it to set precedence. Only it might have backfired
even when evilCorp has their own in house team of evilLawyers, they normally hire outside evilLawyers to handle the cases at trial. in house evilLawyers might not have court/trial experience, and the type of evilLawyer that likes court/trial tend to not like office evilLawyer work. also, in house evilLawyer might not be registered in the state of the trial.
> "I'd expect the legal team were employees, too."
The article actually says this:
> "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"
(edited out how I originally wrongly introduced this quote)
such a cop out answer. someone wrote that bot. someone can investigate logs to see what the bot did. some PM is in charge of the people that wrote the bots. their bonuses are dependent on good reviews. anyone writing automation that doesn't leave a trail to follow wouldn't be worth much. no logging is an amateur move or the move of a guilty party. hopefully, the next case will have lawyers instead of some small shop owner fighting for their life. the lawyer might be able to convince a judge these logs need to be turned over.
all i'm seeing from the work this small business owner did with this case was to find where the loose string in the sweater is. we now just need the right people to start pulling on that string.
It's kafkaesque. This happens when part of a system cannot successfully communicate with another part of the system to resolve problems, whether that's unintentional or design.
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.
That’s assuming Meta has support teams. I’ve yet to see evidence of that. I once had to solve a Facebook business page issue 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 with a couple weeks.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a lot of companies. I got hit by an SUV a few months ago while I was riding my bike and the driver's insurance company said that "they weren't sure he was insured". And then, the day after I filed the police report, all of a sudden they were in a hurry to settle.
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.
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.
"The maximum amount you can claim in a small claims action is $10,000. If your claim exceeds $5,000, the claim will be subject to mandatory mediation."
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.
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.
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.
Like the right to talk outside the penalty of perjury for their defence of course. Since small claims don't have to use actual lawyers, they are not subject to all the enforcement that lawyers are subject to, so I guess the system is not as rigorous. I suppose the discovery is mostly an artesanal process while in a real court it is a highly reagulated thing where the lawyer's ability to work in the future is on the line.
For example you don't really have a special agent interrogating the defence in a small claim court, so that's one way for perjury not to be a factor.
> Like the right to talk outside the penalty of perjury for their defence of course. Since small claims don't have to use actual lawyers, they are not subject to all the enforcement that lawyers are subject to
Are you just guessing? Or do you know these for a fact? It's not hard to find sources contradicting you. See [1] "Lying in any court is called perjury. It is a criminal offence."
Also, the lack of enforcement at present does not confer or imply any right, nor does it imply lack of enforcement in the future. You're conflating a ton of things which makes it hard to respond: defendant vs. others, small-claims vs. others, lack of enforcement vs. rights, etc.
> so I guess the system is not as rigorous.
I mean that would be my guess too, but we're just guessing here.
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.
> 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.
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.
There are billions of Meta users. If even 0.005% ever challenges Meta, that’s too much to handle for the company. So they’ll just enact better policies.
I lost my Instagram account because I was on a VPN while browsing Instagram website. Nothing malicious. Just a normal user. This is good news for users because they build up years of history and connections on these apps.
you are a non paying user, having signed a one sided t&c that also waived your right to class actions. there really is not much recourse since you weren't held against your will.
But the vast majority of them are not paying users, as this cafe owner was. At best this lawsuit sets a precedent for people who are paying for business account services. It does not help ordinary free users at all.
Interestingly, if you look at Reddit sub regarding Instagram, a lot of people go there for help after they've been banned erroneously. One of the top recommendations was to make a paid account for ads just to get a human to look at their request.
Insane.
I don't think Meta and Google should be allowed to ban people without anyway for innocent users to recover the account or to download their own data after a permanent ban.
If Meta and Google had to provide actual support of the kind you describe to non-paying users, they would not be able to run their operations at scale. When the number of your users runs into nine or ten figures, even tiny error rates in your automated algorithms mean large numbers of people are being erroneously banned, and that is simply unfixable because your being able to operate at scale requires almost all of your processes to be automated. Having humans do them is simply not possible.
The only way I would ever see this getting fixed would be for them to abandon the ad-supported business model and actually charge ordinary users for their services. Whether you like it or not, "you get what you pay for" is a thing. If you are getting a service for free, you actually have no right to any kind of support. You just have to take whatever you get. Yes, it sucks, but unfortunately the only way to make sure you aren't a victim is to not trust anything you care about to these services. Which is why I don't.
However, it's still human on the other end. They know they ban a ton of users erroneously. They should have an appeals process for this. For example, maybe allow banned users to pay $1.99 to get a human review. Or provide an actual appeals process or invest in better spam detection.
In my case, it was obvious that it was a mistake. I used NordVPN, a very popular VPN, to browse Instagram.com on my laptop while logged in. Instant ban.
At the very least, banned users should be able to export their data. I had a ton of old contacts on my IG follower/following list that I lost. Impossible to get back.
Don’t conflate the concepts of user and customer. “You are a product” as a user is not an exaggeration but ground truth. They run a business, not a charity or government-subsidized public service, and their paying customers are advertisers.
If you have a problem with Big Social banning your free account, you have a problem not with Meta but with this business model being legal. Offering free “service” to collect and retain ad viewer eyeballs distorts the way market is supposed to work, because it’s impossible to compete with free and customers are locked in.
The only way out of this ever-deepening quagmire is to forbid this business model; all users should be paying customers, so the company is accountable to them, they can vote with their wallet, and the market can do its job properly.
> The only way out of this ever-deepening quagmire is to forbid this business model
I'm not sure this would actually fix the problem. The existing Big Social companies are so committed to this business model that I don't think they are capable of switching. I think some other company (that doesn't exist now) would have to figure out how to run the all-users-are-paying-customers business model at scale for things like search and social media. But who would run such a company? The company that was in the best position to do this, twenty or so years ago, was...Google. They had the tech resources, and they had the "Don't be evil" motto, which back then they were actually making some effort to live up to. And yet nobody there tried to get this done. Who is going to do it now?
By “forbid it” I meant “make it illegal” (not as in “big government tell everyone what to do”, but as in “let the market do its job properly”). If it’s illegal, they would have no other choice would they!
> not as in “big government tell everyone what to do”, but as in “let the market do its job properly”
You are missing a crucial point: the current state of Big Social Media is a product of a free market. Users freely choose to take advantage of the opportunity to use these services without paying for them. "Making it illegal" would mean telling all those users that they can no longer make that choice because the government is taking it away, by passing laws that prevent Big Social Media from offering their services for free. And of course Big Social Media will play that for all it's worth in the political debate that would precede the hypothetical passage of any such law. Not to mention that such a law would also be outlawing all the other tech startups that would benefit from a "freemium" business model.
My prediction is that any such law would be taken off the table due to political pressure long before it got anywhere near actually being passed. But in any case, saying that the law is just to "let the market do its job properly" is obviously wrong. "Free market" doesn't mean you get to outlaw freely chosen transactions that you don't like.
> If it’s illegal, they would have no other choice would they!
If we assume the law you propose actually works and isn't gamed (which is already a big if), my prediction is that Big Social Media would either pivot to some new thing that they could charge for (LLM-based "AI", perhaps), or take their cash and effectively go out of business. I don't think they would just say "oh, well" and actually do the hard work it would take to make all their users paying customers.
The feeling that law is useless is good for Big Social because it helps uphold the status quo.
In practice, companies don’t like doing things that are obviously illegal, especially criminal.
For example, do phone operators sell your phone records? No, because the penalty is 10 years in prison. One employee with good ethics or bad mood is enough to land top management in jail.
Does “records” mean actual contents of the call? No, it means simply “whom you called and when”.
Does social media contain much more sensitive personal information than phone records? Absolutely.
If the law does not penalize selling that information, it only means the law is inadequate, not that it is useless.
> I don't think they would just say "oh, well" and actually do the hard work it would take to make all their users paying customers.
If they won’t, someone else will. It can even be you or me. This is the beauty of free market where honest competition is possible.
> If the law does not penalize selling that information
This is a different proposal from what you made before. This proposed law would not require users to be paying customers (so apps could still have a free tier). It would just require that sensitive personal information gained from apps not be sold to third parties for profit, as is now required for phone records. The effect would be similar, since the ad-supported business model largely relies on such selling of information. But it would be a narrower restriction, because there are many apps with free tiers that do not use the ad-supported business model.
That said, the obvious way to game this law is the definition of "sensitive information". This was never an issue for phone operators because their users are already their customers; people pay for phone service. So there is no incentive for phone operators to try to monetize whatever sensitive information they could harvest, so for them "sensitive information" basically means "whatever information you collect from phone calls" and there is no pressure to manipulate that definition. But it would be a huge issue for Big Social Media, and I would expect them to work very hard to gerrymander the definition of "sensitive information" so it doesn't really restrict their operations.
If they failed and a law like this got passed, would they then actually do the hard work to make all their users paying customers? I still doubt it, but perhaps somewhat less than for the broader law I took you to be proposing before.
If I didn’t provide the definition for “sensitive information” in my comment that doesn’t mean the law can’t have it.
Same as I did not give you a full definition of what “phone records” means, but the relevant law has it.
> This proposed law would not require users to be paying customers
If it’s made illegal to profit from users through such indirect means, then there would be no choice for companies but to require users to be paying customers.
The core issue is not that users don’t pay, but that they are the product (and that hurts the users and distorts how market works, preventing competition). That’s what legislation could address. Whether users pay or not simply follows from market mechanics.
Companies can still provide subsidized accounts for disadvantaged families and cover the costs by charging premium users more, for example, if they want to.
> But it would be a huge issue for Big Social
Absolutely, it’s probably their worst nightmare ;)
> If it’s made illegal to profit from users through such indirect means, then there would be no choice for companies but to require users to be paying customers.
Yes, there would. I already addressed this. Plenty of apps have a free tier (which means those users are not paying customers) but don't sell user information to third parties. There is no reason to outlaw those apps, and your proposal wouldn't.
> The core issue is not that users don’t pay
I agree, which is why I went to the trouble of pointing out that apps could still have a free tier under your proposal.
> Companies can still provide subsidized accounts
Yes, but this is by no means the only possibility. See above.
> There is no reason to outlaw those apps, and your proposal wouldn't.
It’s not about outlawing any app or service, free tier or not. It’s about making a business model illegal because it is anti-competition and anti-free-market.
> It’s not about outlawing any app or service, free tier or not.
I agree that your more recent proposal isn't, but your original proposal was--your original proposal was to legally require all users to be paying customers. You have now changed that to only legally require that user information not be sold for profit to third parties. I am simply emphasizing the difference (a very important one, IMO) between those two proposals.
> It’s about making a business model illegal
I'm not sure I would dignify "selling user information to third parties for profit" with the term "business model". Especially since, as you have already pointed out, there is already a context in which it is illegal (phone call information).
> You have now changed that to only legally require that user information not be sold for profit to third parties
TL;DR it’s about illegalizing a business model that is based on users who are not paying customers. It’s not about forbidding any specific app or service. That’s the difference. The rest is nitpicking.
How you illegalize that model is another question. Forbidding double-sided market may be a good way of doing it. As long as it leaves honest market-compatible business model the only option.
> I'm not sure I would dignify "selling user information to third parties for profit" with the term "business model"
It is nearly a business model of ad-based social media.
Anyway, it is not where the problem is. I have said many times, the point is illegalizing the double-sided market of ad-driven social media where millions of users are not paying customers and there is no competition as a result.
Forbidding the sale of user data would be a completely natural next step, but that’s orthogonal. Even if it is legal, when there is competition you can just switch to another provider if you are unhappy that your data is being sold.
We are not adding anything by rehashing the same thing over and over in this conversation.
> If I didn’t provide the definition for “sensitive information” in my comment that doesn’t mean the law can’t have it.
Sure, it would, but that doesn't mean the definition in the law that ended up getting passed would be what you want it to be. Regulatory capture is a thing.
Nominally, yes, but most of the actual laws we have on the books are regulations written by unelected bureaucrats, not statutes passed by elected representatives. And even the latter serve special interests far more often than they serve the general interests of the people and the country.
I think by now, everyone knows how Meta's business model works. No need to explain it.
The point isn't that I'm a product or a customer. The point is that given the locked in data that can affect real human lives, Meta and Google ought to put more into the process of reversing erroneously banned accounts. I'm not a law expert. Regardless, it's this person who won the case has done a good thing for all Meta users.
> The point is that given the locked in data that can affect real human lives, Meta and Google ought to put more into the process of reversing erroneously banned accounts.
There’s many things they could do to affect human lives better, but they have a fiscal responsibility to not spend money on that unless those humans are their paying customers.
Again, this is not a charity. This is a legal business, if you don’t like this you should fight for a change to the definition of “legal”.
Then why are you saying they should do something that, if you're not business illiterate, you know they can't do at scale?
> They know they ban a ton of users erroneously.
Yes. And they also know...
> They should have an appeals process for this.
...that anything like this that involves humans will not scale. That's why they don't do it: because they can't and still operate at scale.
> banned users should be able to export their data.
Which, again, they cannot support at scale.
Again, the only way this could ever be fixed would be for Meta and Google (and others) to abandon the ad-supported business model. But the only way that will ever happen is if they lose enough users to get their attention. In other words, stop feeding the monster. Complaining that the monster is bad and is doing bad things is pointless now.
> Impossible to get back.
Which, unfortunately, is why you shouldn't depend on them to store such data in the first place.
> 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.
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!
"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
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".
Very impressive going up against Meta's army of lawyers.