• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 28, 2023

Meta Platforms won't have to face a lawsuit accusing it of sending unwanted text messages, a federal appeals court has confirmed.

In an order issued Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Florida resident Colin Brickman's request to reconsider its earlier ruling in favor of Meta.

Absent intervention by the Supreme Court, the order likely brings an end to a dispute dating to 2016, when Brickman alleged that Facebook, now called Meta Platforms, violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending him text messages about his friends' birthdays.

That law, passed in 1991, prohibits companies from using autodialers to text people without their consent.

Meta argued the lawsuit should be dismissed for several reasons, including that its text-sending system isn't an “autodialer,” because it doesn't randomly generate the numbers that are dialed.

The company made a similar argument in a separate robotexting lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court last year. That court unanimously sided with Meta in the matter, ruling that an autodialer had to be capable of using a random or sequential number generator to store or produce the numbers that were called.

Brickman unsuccessfully contended that his lawsuit against Facebook should proceed despite the Supreme Court's ruling, arguing that his allegations regarding Meta's texting equipment differed from those n the dispute decided by the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick in the Northern District of California sided with Meta in 2021 and dismissed Brickman's complaint. Brickman then appealed to the 9th Circuit, which upheld Orrick's order.

The panel wrote in a decision issued last December that Meta didn't violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act because the company didn't use a texting-system “that randomly or sequentially generated the telephone numbers in question.”

Brickman urged the 9th Circuit to reconsider that ruling.

Advocacy groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center sided with Brickman, urging the 9th Circuit to revisit its decision.

“Unconsented to mass dialing causing widespread and extensive harm," the privacy group said in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in February.