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.
> 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.
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
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 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.
"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?
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.
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!
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.
