philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How a Law That Shields Big Tech Is Now Being Used Against It

... Section 230, introduced in the internet’s early days, protects companies from liability related to posts made by users on their sites, making it nearly impossible to sue tech companies over defamatory speech or extremist content. ...

The lawsuit, filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the first to use Section 230 against a tech giant in this way, his lawyers said. It is an unusual legal maneuver that could turn a law that typically protects companies like Meta on its head. And if Mr. Zuckerman succeeds, it could mean more power for consumers to control what they see online. ...

In 2021, after a developer released software to purge users’ Facebook feeds of everyone they follow, Facebook threatened to shut it down. But Section 230 says it is possible to restrict access to obscene, excessively violent and other problematic content. The language shields companies from liability if they censor disturbing content, but lawyers now say it could also be used to justify scrubbing any content users don’t want to see. ...

So Mr. Barclay, who is now 35, built a browser extension tool the same year that would automate the process, called Unfollow Everything. Roughly 12,000 people tried it, he said.

But on July 1, 2021, a law firm representing Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter. His browser extension violated Facebook’s terms of service, including for “impairing the intended operation of Facebook,” the letter said. It also instructed Mr. Barclay to take down his browser extension or face a potential lawsuit. ...

But he and his lawyers were still looking for a legal argument on which to hang their lawsuit. Preparing for a graduate-level class called “Fixing Social Media” in 2022, Mr. Zuckerman read Section 230 and noticed the provision protecting “technical means” to block objectionable content. ...

Mr. Zuckerman is taking that argument a step further, asking the court to pre-emptively protect an effort to build software that filters content because an internet user simply does not want to see it.

“The purpose of the tool is to allow users who find the newsfeed objectionable, or who find the specific sequencing of posts within their newsfeed objectionable, to effectively turn off the feed,” Mr. Zuckerman’s lawyers said in the lawsuit. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/technology/meta-section-230-lawsuit.html