Meta beats suit over tool that lets Facebook users unfollow everything | Hacker News Reader

Meta beats suit over tool that lets Facebook users unfollow everything

arstechnica.com

23 pointsrntn11 comments

It's really interesting to imagine what might happen if people had a legal right to filter their own digital experience without retaliation.

Sure, it might deepen some echo-chambers, but it also might curb the worst excesses of the advertisement/spyware economy.

P.S.: Some implicit aspects:

1. It would be something you can easily to assert to stop dumb lawsuits quickly without expense.

2. You can't blindly sign it away through click-wrap agreements.

3. It extends to helping others with the creation/sale of filtering tools, unofficial patches, and jailbreaks.

Isn't this the dream of bluesky?

I don't think so: A federated network of social-media mini-sites doesn't really relate to things like blocking ads in your browser, automatically filtering out sections of radio/podcasts in your car that happen to contain siren noises, or a parent putting up barriers to adult content on a device.

Are web not taking about being able to curate/moderate/filter your own feeds?

Because one of Bluesky's goals is to have 3rd party filtering and moderation.

Zuckerman vs. Zuckerberg, man vs. mountain...

If Meta then sued to block the tool, he'd be glad to have a paper trail showing that was predictable and that his claim was not "baseless," as Meta successfully argued.

I find it to be a smart move

Courts don’t like it when you waste their time suing over theoretical harms

Exactly. Imagine how overwhelmed the courts would be with real cases if people could sue over hypothetical harms. People have many fears—some justified, some not. The main reason you can’t just sue for a theoretical harm is that everyone is focused on dealing with real issues.

It's not "theoretical" when Meta actually shut down a similar tool using legal threats. Are you seriously arguing that threat is just gone now?

Unless you’re the Supreme Court ruling on a fictitious gay website customer that is.

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-gay-rights-lgbtq-we...

> About a month after the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom filed the case in Colorado federal court in 2016, lawyers for the state said it should be dismissed partly because Smith hadn’t been harmed by the state’s anti-discrimination law. Smith — who did not plan to start creating wedding websites until her case was resolved — would first have to get a request from a gay couple and refuse, triggering a possible complaint against her, the state argued.

> Smith’s lawyers maintained that she didn’t have to be punished for violating the law before challenging it. In a February 2017 filing, they revealed that though she did not need a request to pursue the case, she had, in fact, received one. An appendix to the filing included a website request form submitted by Stewart on Sept. 21, 2016, a few days after the lawsuit was filed. It also included a Feb. 1, 2017, affidavit from Smith stating that Stewart’s request had been received.

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