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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

From one of the Reddit comments, there's apparently a Discord organising a class action lawsuit about it:

Likely barred due to binding arbitration clauses. The upside of such is that Facebook has to pay the arbitration filing fees, so you can get a full refund for the device out of it (it's cheaper than paying for arbitration).

This can be as devastating class action law suit. If enough people start exercising their right to arbitration it can get VERY costly for Facebook.

I can’t find the story now, but there was a case in I think California of a company suing to get out of an arbitration clause, wanting instead to move to a class action lawsuit. Thousands of arbitrations became time consuming and costly. So I think there is still big potential for a coordinated effort to make this difficult for Facebook, even if a class action suite were off the table.

You're thinking of the DoorDash arbitration case, there's a great legal review by a lawyer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyzTOjXxgw

(IANAL)

The summary is DoorDash agreements with its dashers demanded arbitration, which costs both parties an amount, but thousands of dashers invoked the clause which cost DoorDash millions in fees.

DoorDash then tried to get out of it and opt-out or arbitration, but they couldn't.

Uber.

Something like 62000 drivers at last count invoked the arbitration clause, which got mighty costly.

Can't say I feel sorry for them.

U.S. legal question:

Is there anything unlawful about offering to cover legal fees for everyone wanting to pursue good-faith legal recourse (including arbitration) against a particular company?

For example, suppose I'm a mega-billionaire who simply finds Facebook's conduct abhorrent. So I offer to pay for the Binding Arbitration fees of every Facebook user who has a plausible claim against Facebook.

And would the legality of that change if I was majority stakeholder in one of Facebook's competitors?

I'm not a lawyer. But I think this is pretty much what happened when Peter Thiel funded lawsuits against Gawker until one of them bankrupted them.

https://www.thewrap.com/silicon-valley-billionaire-peter-thi...

probably violates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champerty_and_maintenance, although I'm not sure whether it's applicable for the US.

Interesting. That page does have a "US" section though, which makes it seem possible in much of the country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champerty_and_maintenance#Unit...

I don’t think click through tos are legal. It’s just convention to pretend they are real. The real world equivalent is a 15 page sign in a store that says “by entering this store you consent to our staff living on your couch”

Some of them might be real enough.

From what I've heard, one big reason for the arbitration clauses is just so that the CEO won't get dragged off to small claims court all the time.

(Otherwise, you just need to convince a sympathetic judge that the CEO or some other senior official is important to the case, and they'd need to show up or risk contempt of court.

Not very likely for any individual case, but the chances add up with bigger numbers of claims.)

Do you have a link with more information on this? Does this also work in Europe?

A full refund and a switch from a Rift-S to something like a G2 seems like an amazing deal to me.

There are companies out there willing to help with this. Mass arbitration, when actually -done- can quickly wind up more expensive for the company than a class action.

Uber and Lyft had their mass arbitrations handled by a specific law firm that deals with consumer as well as employee issues, perhaps they are worth reaching out to.

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