> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.