Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid

Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case related to the definition and function of auto dialers under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) to send unsolicited text messages. In a unanimous decision based on statutory interpretation of the TCPA, the Supreme Court ruled that auto dialers are defined by their function to either store or produce telephone numbers from a random or sequential number generator.

Background

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed to cut down the number of unsolicited calls that consumers were receiving. Among its provisions, the TCPA disallowed the use of automated dialers from being used to contact consumers through services that may cost the consumer money, such as through cell phones or text messaging, with violations accessed and fined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Amendments have been made to the TCPA; relevant to this case was an amendment added in 2015 that exempted automated calls made to pay-for consumer lines for federal debt collection purposes. Since its inception, this "autodialer" provision of the TCPA has been challenged as a violation of free speech rights under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, but the federal Circuit Courts have generally upheld all challenges to the statute. The 2015 amendment created a new line of arguments to challenge the autodialer statute of the TCPA as it carved out an exception for one type of speech and making the whole statute fundamentally content-based and unconstitutional. Concurrent to this case, the judicial proceedings of Barr v.