Dr. Susan Block Steps Up Her Fight Against Meta Platforms

LOS ANGELES—Dr. Susan Block is stepping up her legal fight with Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg. Block contends that Meta's content moderation algorithms censored and deactivated her Facebook profile and Instagram account unfairly, arbitrarily and without warning. In previous reporting, AVN has covered Block's ongoing legal dispute with Meta in a bid to challenge an arbitration award granted to the company. Block filed a motion to vacate. Block’s motion maintains that not only was the arbitrator biased in this case, prejudiced about basic sex education, ignorant of algorithmic error rates, and disingenuous about Facebook’s vast and unique social media power, but that there was no legal authority to litigate a breach of contract for Facebook and Instagram. “This past Halloween, I summoned the spirit of 'Free Speech Woman' within me to hold—or at least try to hold—[Mark Zuckerberg] down on the Mat of Truth, holding him accountable for censoring our speech, exploiting our desires, stoking our divisions, flattening our relationships and banning us from our own communities and the Internet’s public square," Block explained. "What right does Mark Zuckerberg have to ban me from the ‘digital equivalent of the town square’—to banish me from my own communities, even my own family during a time of need—just because his faulty algorithms ascertain that my politics, religion or sex-positive values might offend a Meta advertiser[...]?”