The upcoming conference is set to take place more than half a decade after civilian Noah Duguid, who said he was never a Facebook user, sued the social media company in a series of claims that alleged its automated text message alerts violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a federal law passed in 1991 to regulate unsolicited telemarketing correspondence.
Duguid’s complaint, initially filed as a class-action suit in California district court, claimed that Facebook violated a TCPA statute and sought monetary compensation from the company for each unwanted text received. Facebook denied that its messaging operations were consistent with those of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) in its defense, and the district court ruled in favor of the defense. However, when Duguid later pursued an appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court found the opposite and reversed the district court’s previous dismissal.
“Duguid’s nonconclusory allegations plausibly suggest that Facebook’s equipment falls within this definition [of an ATDS],” one jurist wrote in the 2019 decision, noting the plaintiff alleged that Facebook maintains a roster of phone numbers and “programs its equipment to automatically generate messages to those stored numbers.”
“Those factual allegations, accepted as true and construed in the light most favorable to Duguid, sufficiently plead that Facebook sent Duguid messages using ’equipment which has the capacity . . . to store numbers to be called . . . and to dial such numbers,’” it continued.
Facebook subsequently filed a petition to the Supreme Court with requests to hear its challenges to the appellate judges’ ruling. The petition presented questions that pertained to the TCPA’s statutory framework as well as constitutionality. It asked justices to clarify the definition of an ATDS and specifically determine whether it applies to all electronic systems that can store and automatically dial phone numbers, including those that do so without using “a random or sequential number generator.”
Facebook also asked the high court to consider an additional question as to whether the TCPA’s rules against telephone correspondence through an ATDS violated the First Amendment’s free speech clause—an argument it also presented to the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court limited the scope of its argument to the former question exclusively when it granted Facebook’s petition this past summer.
