The company that owns Facebook argued in a Chamber of the Moncton court on Tuesday that must be eliminated from a lawsuit filed by a former Campbellton doctor.
Dr. Jean-Robert Ngola is demanding Meta Platforms Inc., owner of Facebook. He states that the company participated in events that led him to leave his practice in New Brunswick five years ago.
“Everything should be surprised,” said Miranda Spence, who represents goal platforms, to the Mayan Judge Hamuu at the King Court Bank of Moncton.
In the spring of 2020, Ngola was accused of not being properly isolated at the height of COVID-19 restrictions. Finally gave positive for the virus.
Press conference considered a spark
At a press conference, former Prime Minister Blaine Higgs publicly blamed a Covid outbreak in Northern New Brunswick who charged two lives to an unidentified person who broke the rules.
Within an hour of being advised by the public health of its positive Covid results, Ngola’s identity and photo appeared on social networks, and some were quickly labeled by some as “zero patient”, their lawyers have alleged.
Ngola said it was the objective of harmful and racist comments on Facebook, causing mental anguish and stress.
He left his practice in New Brunswick and moved to Quebec later that year.
The province and the RCMP are also appointed in the doctor’s demand, which also alleges, among other things, “systemic institutional anti-negral racism,” abuse of power, malicious prosecution and a violation of their rights of the Charter.
The lawyers who represent both defendants have submitted documents to the courts describing their respective defenses.
Since the lawsuit was filed in 2022, goal is the only defendant who has still submitted a defense declaration, effectively delaying the case of going to trial.
But in court on Tuesday, lawyers who represent the goal in their place established why they believe that there is no way that Ngola’s statements against the company may succeed in the trial.
Ngola believes that Meta violated his privacy
Ngola’s lawyer, Erica Brown, reminded the Court on Tuesday that her client states that a goal was negligent in how she drove, or supposedly did not handle, “harmful content and racist material,” he said he was addressed to Ngola on Facebook.
There were no examples of the positions in question in court, but it was confirmed that Ngola previously presented 65 pages of screenshots that he gathered at that time.
Brown argued that goal should have known that publications directed to Ngola were inappropriate and went against the community standards of the service, whose objective is to protect users from hate discourse and other potentially harmful content.
Appearing by video, he told Hamou that Ngola “confided” on the platform to tear down the publications. Instead, he said, the company’s algorithms increased publications at the top of the user pages and allowed them to gain spectators.
Brown said the company intentionally maintained the content for its “own commercial benefit.”
Spence, who also appeared by video, replied saying “nobody called the publications to the goal attention” and “would be a different case” if he had done it because he would have triggered the company’s process to review the content.
He also said that Facebook community standards do not force moderators to proactively examine each publication before they are marked.
“Anyone who has something written about them on Facebook would have a claim,” Spence argued.
Brown also said that Facebook violated Ngola’s privacy by allowing personal medical information and his photograph to circulate without their consent.
“Facebook did not collect information about the doctor who later launched,” Spence replied. “Facebook simply served as a platform.”
Ngola requesting portion of the finish network in damage
Spence told the Court on Tuesday that Ngola demands three percent of the net global target profits.
She said the doctor’s demand does not go into details about how she suffered damage after publications on social networks, and called him an attempt to “attract attention.”
In his arguments, Brown said that in addition to the stress that Ngola experienced in the publications, he incurred costs with his decision to move to Quebec before what he had planned.
She said she sold her house with a loss and left an expensive medical team when she left her clinic in New Brunswick.
Hamou said he would reserve his decision on whether target will be expelled from the lawsuit and that he would contact the legal teams “as soon as possible.”
