[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.

[kazinator]

I understand precedents. How much can it help?

The goal isn't just to win (which the guy did, after all) but not spend years.

Suppose the existence of precedent knocks it down from 6 to 3 years. That's twice better, but still poor. Most people will give up.

[aurareturn]

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.

[hackernewds]

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.

soldati was a paying customer

[pdonis]

> There are billions of Meta users.

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.

[aurareturn]

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.

[pdonis]

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.

[aurareturn]

I get it. I'm not business illiterate.

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.

[FireBeyond]

> This shows you have no idea how the US court system works. Meta's defeat leads to a build up of case law...

In many states, precedent can't be set in a small claims court.

[awongh]

class action suits don’t contribute to case law?