Facebook Chalks Win as Supreme Court Hands Down Autodialer Class Action Ruling

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) sided with Facebook in a class action lawsuit that claimed the social media giant violated federal law by sending unwanted text messages in a unanimous decision issued Thursday.

In its decision, SCOTUS ruled Facebook did not violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act – the 1991 law that bars companies from making robocalls – when it sent automated text messages to a Montana man and others.

The class action lawsuit was filed in 2015 by lead plaintiff Noah Duguid, who said he received several security alerts from Facebook sent by text message using an autodialer, or automatic telephone dialing system, despite having never been a Facebook user.

Although Duguid said he sent multiple complaints regarding the unwanted texts, he only received automated replies instructing him to address the problem by logging into his account.

“Facebook operates a sloppy system and in doing so shows complete disregard for the privacy of consumers,” Duguid wrote in his Facebook autodialer lawsuit.

Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, an autodialer is defined as “equipment which has the capacity—(A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such numbers.”

Businesses are prohibited from using these devices to make calls or send texts to cell phones without the recipient’s prior express consent. Forty-one states and Washington, D.C., also have laws on the books that restrict the use of autodialers in an effort to protect consumers from the invasion of privacy and annoyance caused by robocallers. Both the Federal Trade Commission and state attorney generals may enforce telemarketing abuses under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act.

Facebook, for its part, said it had never used an autodialer – users must enter their cellular telephone numbers themselves into Facebook’s database, and at any rate, the texts sent by Facebook qualified as emergency calls, the company claimed.

The district court where Duguid first filed the lawsuit sided with Facebook, but the Ninth Circuit of Appeals reversed the decision in 2019.

In its decision, SCOTUS agreed, for the most part, with the original district court ruling, derailing Duguid’s class action lawsuit. In an opinion that was joined by all except one of the nine Supreme Court justices – Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate concurrence – Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that if the lawsuit moved forward, it would expand the definition of an autodialer under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act unnecessarily and “take a chainsaw” to a nuanced problem.

“The TCPA’s liability provisions, then, could affect ordinary cell phone owners in the course of commonplace usage, such as speed dialing or sending automated text message responses,” Sotomayor wrote.

This is far from the only case in which a company has been accused of TCPA violations for allegedly sending unsolicited text-spam messages to consumers. Many businesses that allegedly employ automated dialers to call or text consumers without their expressed consent are facing potential TCPA class action lawsuits or individual TCPA text spam lawsuits.

If you were contacted on your cell phone by a company via an unsolicited text message (text spam) or prerecorded voice message (robocall), you may be eligible for compensation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Learn more here.

Have you been contacted by Facebook by text message? What happened? Tell us in the comment section below. 

The Facebook Autodialer Lawsuit is Facebook Inc. v. Duguid, Case No.19-511, in the United States Supreme Court.

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