The company that owns Facebook argued in a Moncton courtroom Tuesday that it should be removed from a lawsuit brought by a former Campbellton doctor.
Dr. Jean-Robert Ngola is suing Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook. He claims the company had a hand in events that led him to leave his practice in New Brunswick five years ago.
“The entire thing should be struck out,” Miranda Spence, who represents Meta Platforms, told Justice Maya Hamou in Moncton’s Court of King’s Bench.
In the spring of 2020, Ngola was accused of failing to isolate properly at the height of COVID-19 restrictions. He eventually tested positive for the virus.
At a news conference, former premier Blaine Higgs publicly blamed a COVID outbreak in northern New Brunswick that claimed two lives on an unidentified individual who broke the rules.
Within an hour of being advised by Public Health of his positive COVID results, Ngola’s identity and photo appeared on social media, and he was quickly labelled by some as “patient zero,” his lawyers have alleged.
Ngola claimed he was the target of harmful and racist comments on Facebook, causing him 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 named in the doctor’s lawsuit, which also alleges, among other things, “institutional anti-Black systemic racism,” abuse of power, malicious prosecution and a breach of his Charter rights.
Lawyers representing both defendants have filed documents to the courts outlining their respective defences.
Province, RCMP deny doctor’s allegations of racism, ‘political scapegoating’
Since the lawsuit was filed in 2022, Meta is the only defendant yet to file a statement of defence, effectively delaying the case from going to trial.
But in court Tuesday, lawyers representing Meta instead laid out why they believe there is no way that Ngola’s claims against the company could be successful at trial.
Ngola’s lawyer, Erica Brown, reminded the court Tuesday that her client claims Meta was negligent in how it handled — or allegedly failed to handle — “harmful content and racist material” she said was directed toward Ngola on Facebook.
Examples of the posts in question were not presented in court, but it was confirmed that Ngola previously submitted 65 pages of screenshots he gathered at the time.
Brown argued that Meta ought to have known that the posts targeting Ngola were inappropriate and went against the service’s community standards, which aim to protect users from hate speech and other potentially harmful content.
Appearing by video, she told Hamou that Ngola “relied” on the platform to take down the posts. Instead, she said, the company’s algorithms boosted the posts to the top of users’ pages and enabled them to gain viewers.
Brown said the company intentionally kept the content up for its “own commercial gain.”
Spence, who also appeared by video, responded by saying “no one ever drew the posts to Meta’s attention,” and “it would be a different case” if they had because it would have triggered the company’s process to review content.
She also said Facebook’s community standards do not oblige moderators to proactively vet each post before they are flagged.
“Anyone who has something written about them on Facebook would have a claim,” Spence argued.
Brown also claimed that Facebook breached Ngola’s privacy by allowing personal medical information and his photograph to circulate without his consent.
“Facebook did not collect information about the doctor that it then released,” Spence replied. “Facebook merely served as the platform.”
Spence told the court Tuesday that Ngola is demanding three per cent of Meta’s net global profit in damages.
She said the doctor’s lawsuit does not go into detail about how he suffered any damages following the social media posts, and called it an attempt “to get attention.”
In her arguments, Brown said that on top of the stress Ngola experienced from the posts, he incurred costs with his decision to move to Quebec earlier than he’d anticipated.
She said he sold his house at a loss and left costly medical equipment behind as he left his clinic in New Brunswick.
Hamou said that she would reserve her decision on whether Meta will be struck from the lawsuit, and that she would be in touch with legal teams “as soon as possible.”
