In a somewhat ridiculous lawsuit recently filed against Twitter, two California residents claim Twitter violated the TCPA and privacy guidelines by sending confirmatory opt-out messages.
Put simply, the two are suing based on the claim that Twitter was wrong to send them a confirmation SMS after they themselves sent the “STOP” command to express the fact they no longer wished to receive messages from Twitter. The men claim that after they sent the initial “STOP” command that Twitter should have ceased communication altogether, and that is was illegal to receive the simple confirmatory message making sure they truly wanted to opt-out. This is something nearly all SMS programs do.
The two men, Drew Moss and Sahar Maleksaeedi, say an “automatic telephone dialing system” was employed to deliver the confirmatory message, and that they incurred a charge for incoming calls as a result. This is illegal, the two men claim, because the message in question was not sent for emergency purposes and without prior consent given. According to the lawsuit documents, Moss and Maleksaeedi seek up to $1,500 in damages for each call in alleged violation of the TCPA, which, when aggregated among a proposed class number in the “tens of thousands”, would exceed the $5 million threshold for federal court jurisdiction.
From the lawsuit:
At some point Plaintiffs decided that they no longer wanted to receive text message notifications on their cellular telephone from Defendant. Plaintiffs then responded to Defendant’s last text message notification by replying “stop,” as instructed by Twitter. At this point, Plaintiffs withdrew any express or implied consent to receive text message notification to their cellular telephone that they may have previous given Twitter. In response to receiving this revocation of consent, Defendant then immediately sent another, unsolicited, confirmatory text message to Plaintiffs’ cellular telephones.
The full lawsuit is embedded below…
