Teatotaller cafe owner wins Instagram case in court
seacoastonline.com
seacoastonline.com
Very impressive going up against Meta's army of lawyers.
That -has- to be cheaper than getting all these lawyers involved over what was probably, as the article states, a glitch of some sort.
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.
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
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.
They had to either fight the case, or figure out what team could actually sort this out and convince their manager to take a look.
In the unlikely event they managed the first of those tasks, the second would present an insurmountable hurdle.
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)
I lost my IG account multiple times due to using a VPN. I’m a normal user. Nothing malicious. Every support request is answered by only a robot.
> 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.
"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."
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.
The judge found:
> The defendant provided two conflicting reasons for the deletion
Isn't this lying under oath? How is it not perjury?
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.
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.
[1] https://www.smallclaimsportal.com/help/141-what-happens-if-i...
This could turn into a mini-industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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”.
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?
Yes, I understand that.
> 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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
soldati was a paying customer
In many states, precedent can't be set in a small claims court.
A crack in Section 230. Nice!
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!
I assume by “they” you mean FB/IG. They aren’t the ones who filed suit, so it’s a hard case to make. But I do feel there’s an implicit contract.
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".
I'm sure he's a lovely person though.
> What are you doing?
> Protecting oil companies from litigation. They're our client. They don't lose legal protection because they make a lot of money.
> I can't believe no one ever wrote a folk song about that.