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Meta has defeated a lawsuit—for now—that attempted to invoke Section 230 protections for a third-party tool that would have made it easy for Facebook users to toggle on and off their news feeds as they pleased.
The lawsuit was filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He feared that Meta might sue to block his tool, Unfollow Everything 2.0, because Meta threatened to sue to block the original tool when it was released by another developer. In May, Zuckerman told Ars that he was “suing Facebook to make it better” and planned to use Section 230’s shield to do it.
Zuckerman’s novel legal theory argued that Congress always intended for Section 230 to protect third-party tools designed to empower users to take control over potentially toxic online environments. In his complaint, Zuckerman tried to convince a US district court in California that:
Section 230(c)(2)(B) immunizes from legal liability “a provider of software or enabling tools that filter, screen, allow, or disallow content that the provider or user considers obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” Through this provision, Congress intended to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see.
Digital rights advocates, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, supported Zuckerman’s case, urging that the court protect middleware. But on Thursday, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley granted Meta’s motion to dismiss at a hearing.
Corley has not yet posted her order on the motion to dismiss, but Zuckerman’s lawyers at the Knight Institute confirmed to Ars that their Section 230 argument did not factor into her decision. In a statement, lawyers said that Corley left the door open on the Section 230 claims, and EFF senior staff attorney Sophia Cope, who was at the hearing, told Ars Corley agreed that on “the merits the case raises important issues.”
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