Meta's Opposition to Voyager's Dismissal Motion ‘Assiduously Avoids’ Key Arguments: Reply

Though Meta submitted a lengthy opposition to Voyager Labs’ motion to dismiss Meta’s data-scraping complaint (see 2307050001), “very little of that brief addresses the actual grounds for dismissal,” said Voyager’s reply Friday (docket 3:23-cv-00154) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. Meta alleges that Voyager, in the six months ended in January, created more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts, which it used to scrape information from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ viewable profiles, including from more than 30,000 in California, in violation of the platform’s terms of service. Meta’s opposition to the motion to dismiss “assiduously avoids” Voyager’s “primary arguments and on-point caselaw,” said Voyager’s reply. But under the most “analogous precedent” from the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and the Northern District of California, Meta’s complaint fails to place Voyager “on notice of the online adhesion contracts it has allegedly breached,” it said. The complaint also fails to allege “any facts from which it could be reasonably inferred” that Voyager “manifested assent to any such contract,” it said. Meta's theory of contract formation “remains entirely unclear, with fundamental, threshold questions left entirely unanswered,” it said.