Can you publish and use a Facebook plugin that deletes all subscribers to a feed at once without being legally sued by the meta-company? That question remains unanswered for now after U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley on Thursday temporarily dismissed a declaratory action to that effect. This was reported by the New York Times, citing court documents. Professor Ethan Zuckerman filed a lawsuit to ensure that the Meta Group, which owns the social media platform Facebook, could not sue him if he released such a tool on the market that allowed users to edit their own flow.

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The matter has a history: several years ago, the British Louis Barclay had 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, after which Barclay stopped his project for fear of the consequences. However, since the end of August, Professor Ethan Zuckerman, a communications researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has brought the subject back into focus and in a broader context: who actually has decision-making power over content social media, who determines what we see there?

The CDA in the sense of users?

In clarifying this issue, Zuckerman is receiving support from the Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that advocates for free speech. Zuckerman and attorneys at the Knight First Amendment Institute rely on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and argue that the browser plug-in makes you the provider of an interactive computer service. This would allow not only platform operators to intervene on the news feed, but also users, in order to prevent the dissemination of content deemed offensive or malicious. On this basis, Zuckerman and his lawyers wanted to establish that they could not sue Meta if they developed and released such a tool. We described the context in detail in the article Zuckerman v. Zuckerberg: Right to Facebook Plugins Sued for.

Meta filed an appeal against the declaratory action and requested that it be dismissed in its entirety. Judge Corley of the U.S. 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 file a new complaint if such a tool were available.

“We are disappointed that the court finds that Professor Zuckerman must code the tool before the court takes up the case,” said Ramya Krishnan, one of Zuckerman’s lawyers. “We continue to believe that Section 230 generally protects enabling tools and we 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 called the lawsuit “meritless.”

(dz)