Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-cand-3_19-cv-01297/USCOURTS-cand-3_19-cv-01297-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 28:1331 Federal Question: Other Civil Rights

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United States District Court

Northern District of California

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

THOMAS HAYES,

Plaintiff,

v.

FACEBOOK, et al.,

Defendants.

Case No. 19-cv-01297-TSH 

ORDER GRANTING MOTION TO 

DISMISS

Re: Dkt. No. 40

I. INTRODUCTION

Plaintiff Thomas Hayes sued Facebook and its CEO for defamation concerning warnings 

Facebook posted about clicking on the links to Hayes’s own website or his email address. 

Following transfer of this action from the District of Colorado, this Court held oral argument on 

March 28, 2019 on Defendants’ motion to dismiss. The Court GRANTS the motion for the 

following reasons.

II. BACKGROUND

Hayes is a Colorado resident. He owns Seventh Generation Fuels, LLC, a start-up 

company that aims to become an environmentally clean renewable energy producer. Hayes owns 

three web pages (all at the domain wakute.wixsite.com) touting the company’s exclusive 

licensing, brokering, contracting and leasing rights, as well as other business rights related to U.S. 

patent No. 9057024. Hayes joined Facebook on June 28, 2018 to promote his business and 

website, with the specific goal of enlisting Facebook users to write or help write a grant 

application for his business. He says the company needs to raise approximately $80,000 in 

funding. 

Starting on July 10, 2018, Hayes discovered that when Facebook users click on the link to 

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the wakute.wixsite.com website or on his email address (santeeseven@yahoo.com), Facebook 

displayed the message: “BLOCKED – We believe the link you are trying to visit is malicious. 

For your safety, we have blocked it.” Starting on September 22, 2018, the message changed to: 

“You Can’t Go to This Link From Facebook. The link you tried to visit goes against our 

Community Standards.” Hayes refers to these as the “blocking messages.”

Hayes alleges that these messages deter potential grant writers and investors from 

contacting him by suggesting they will get a computer virus if they do so. He has sued Facebook 

and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for defamation. He seeks $80,000 in damages for his inability to 

get a grant. He also seeks $30 million in damages for what he calls the administrative start-up 

costs listed in his company’s 2018-19 business plan, or if that full amount is not awarded, 10% of 

it.

Hayes filed this lawsuit on September 12, 2018 in the District of Colorado. ECF No. 1. 

He amended the complaint on October 23, 2018. ECF No. 10. Defendants moved to dismiss for 

lack of personal jurisdiction and on the merits. ECF No. 40. On the same day, they moved to 

transfer this action to the Northern District of California, citing the forum selection clause in 

Facebook’s terms of service. ECF No. 41. The District of Colorado granted the transfer motion 

on March 6, 2019. ECF No. 54.1 

III. LEGAL STANDARD2

A complaint must contain a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the 

pleader is entitled to relief.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2). A complaint must therefore provide a 

defendant with “fair notice” of the claims against it and the grounds for relief. Bell Atl. Corp. v. 

Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) (internal quotations and citation omitted).

A court may dismiss a complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) when it does not contain enough 

facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face. Id. at 570. “A claim has facial 

plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable 

 

1 The parties have consented to have a magistrate judge determine this action. ECF Nos. 17, 32, 

34.

2 At oral argument, Defendants agreed the transfer of this case has mooted their personal 

jurisdiction arguments.

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inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 

678 (2009). “The plausibility standard is not akin to a ‘probability requirement,’ but it asks for 

more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully.” Id. (quoting Twombly, 550 

U.S. at 557). “While a complaint attacked by a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss does not need 

detailed factual allegations, a plaintiff’s obligation to provide the ‘grounds’ of his ‘entitle[ment] to 

relief’ requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a 

cause of action will not do.” Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555 (internal citations and parentheticals 

omitted). “Factual allegations must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative 

level.” Id.

In considering a motion to dismiss, a court must accept all factual allegations as true and 

construe them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. Id. at 550; Erickson v. Pardus, 551 U.S. 

89, 93-94 (2007); Vasquez v. Los Angeles Cty., 487 F.3d 1246, 1249 (9th Cir. 2007). 

If a Rule 12(b)(6) motion is granted, the “court should grant leave to amend even if no 

request to amend the pleading was made, unless it determines that the pleading could not possibly 

be cured by the allegation of other facts.” Lopez v. Smith, 203 F.3d 1122, 1127 (9th Cir. 2000) (en 

banc) (internal quotations and citations omitted). However, the Court may deny leave to amend 

for a number of reasons, including “undue delay, bad faith or dilatory motive on the part of the 

movant, repeated failure to cure deficiencies by amendments previously allowed, undue prejudice 

to the opposing party by virtue of allowance of the amendment, [and] futility of amendment.” 

Eminence Capital, LLC v. Aspeon, Inc., 316 F.3d 1048, 1052 (9th Cir. 2003) (citing Foman v. 

Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 182 (1962)).

IV. DISCUSSION

A. Article III Standing

Defendants’ first argument is that Hayes lacks Article III standing. They argue that he has 

failed to plead any concrete injury caused by the allegedly defamatory statements. In Defendants’ 

view, Hayes “does not claim that any investor, business partner, Facebook user, or other person 

actually viewed them. He does not allege that such person ever tried to visit his web pages or click 

on his email address.” ECF No. 40-1 at 9. In short, Defendants say that it is hypothetical or 

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conjectural whether anybody other than Hayes saw the statements. Id. Hayes’s opposition brief, 

ECF No. 48, does not directly address this issue.

It is true that hypothetical or conjectural harms are insufficient to confer Article III 

standing. Rather, a “plaintiff must have suffered an ‘injury in fact’ – an invasion of a legally 

protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized and (b) ‘actual or imminent, not 

“conjectural” or “hypothetical.”’” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992) 

(citations omitted). Further, “there must be a causal connection between the injury and the 

conduct complained of – the injury has to be ‘fairly . . . trace[able] to the challenged action of the 

defendant,’” id. In addition, “it must be ‘likely,’ as opposed to merely ‘speculative,’ that the 

injury will be ‘redressed by a favorable decision.’” Id. (citations omitted).

However, Defendants have read the amended complaint too narrowly. Hayes alleges that 

“[f]rom July 10th, 2018 until September 12th, 2018, the Defendant (Facebook) publicly posted 

this message and displayed it to all active Facebook users, investors and viewers whenever they 

click on Plaintiff’s web-page or email address.” ECF No. 10 (emphasis added). He also alleges 

that “Defendant is also suggesting potential investors and viewers do not contact Plaintiff by 

posting the above block messages as a response to viewers attempting to contact Plaintiff by his 

email address listed on his Facebook page. Id. (emphasis added). Read fairly, these constitute 

sufficient allegations that potential investors and viewers are clicking on his web page and email 

address and seeing these messages, not just that they might do so. To be sure, other allegations in 

the amended complaint are more conjectural, such as the following one cited by Defendants: “If 

and when curious potential investors decide to cut and paste any of the Plaintiff’s blocked 

information they will be led to believe none of the Plaintiff’s web-page content is valid nor true 

and that Plaintiff is too malicious to contact . . .” Id. (emphasis added). But the conjectural 

allegations in the amended complaint do not undo the non-conjectural ones.

Defendants also take issue with the causation and injury components of Article III 

standing, arguing that “Plaintiff does not allege, for example, that any person viewed the allegedly 

defamatory statement(s) and subsequently refrained from contacting him or doing business with 

him.” ECF No. 40-1 at 10. However, that argument demands more than what Article III standing 

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requires. For standing purposes, Facebook’s blocking messages are a concrete and particularized 

injury because they effectively deprive Hayes of a medium of communication to promote his 

business. Whether he would have found someone on Facebook to write an application for an 

$80,000 grant, let alone investors who would have provided him with $30 million in financing, is 

a question of whether he can prove damages on the merits of his claim. But there’s no doubt that 

effectively cutting off a means of advertising is enough of an injury to support Article III standing. 

It’s a concrete and particularized injury – it’s happening to him, not everybody. According to the 

amended complaint, it’s an actual injury because people are being deterred from contacting him. 

And it’s redressable, for example, by an injunction to take down the blocking message.

B. The Merits

The Court turns, then, to the merits. Initially, there is a dispute about which state’s law 

applies. Hayes relies on Colorado law, whereas Defendants contend that California law applies, 

citing Facebook’s terms of service. But the answer to this question does not seem to matter, as 

Defendants acknowledge that “California’s defamation law mirrors Colorado’s.” ECF No. 40-1 

n.7. The Court therefore declines to resolve that issue.

Defendants make a number of arguments why the blocking statements do not constitute 

actionable defamation, but it is not necessary to reach them all. The easiest one is sufficient: The 

statements Hayes complains about are not about him. “In California, whether statements can be 

reasonably interpreted as referring to [the] plaintiff[] is a question of law for the court. If there is 

no express reference to the plaintiff in a defamation statement, the claim will fail unless the 

statement refers to the plaintiff by reasonable implication.” SDV/ACCI, Inc. v. AT&T Corp., 522 

F.3d 955, 959 (9th Cir. 2008). Colorado law similarly requires that the defamatory statement be 

about the plaintiff. See Dorr v. C.B. Johnson, Inc., 660 P.2d 517, 519 (Colo. Ct. App. 1983)

(“None of the statements claimed to have been made by defendants were defamatory of or 

concerning plaintiff Carol Ann Dorr. Therefore, the dismissal of these claims as to her was 

proper.”).

Here, Hayes alleges that Facebook’s blocking notice displayed when users clicked on the 

link to his business website (wakute.wixsite.com) or his email address (santeeseven@yahoo.com). 

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Neither the website domain nor the email address incorporates Hayes’s name or other information 

reasonably identifying him. Accordingly, the statements do not reference Hayes personally. It is 

true, of course, “that defamatory statements about a company can reasonably be understood to 

refer to the owner of the company,” but in most of those cases, “the businesses bore the individual 

plaintiff’s name,” SDV/ACCI, 522 F.3d at 959 (citations omitted). Where, as here, the defamatory 

statements are about the company, and the company is not named after the owner, there must be 

factual allegations to show that “not only must [the statement] be capable of being understood to 

refer to the plaintiff, but [it] also must be shown actually to have been so understood by a third 

party.” Id. at 960; see also Restatement (Second) of Torts § 564 cmt. a (“It is necessary that the 

recipient of the defamatory communication understand it as intended to refer to the plaintiff.”). 

Here, the amended complaint contains no factual allegations showing that any third party would 

think Facebook’s blocking statements refer to Hayes. Accordingly, his defamation claim does not 

survive a motion to dismiss.

Finally, Defendants argue that regardless of whether Hayes states a claim against 

Facebook, he certainly does not against Zuckerberg. Defendants are correct. Federal Rule of 

Civil Procedure 8(a)(2) states that the complaint “must contain . . . a short and plain statement of 

the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief . . .” A plaintiff must satisfy this 

requirement as to each defendant. See Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 683. Here, other than listing Zuckerberg 

on the caption page and naming him as a defendant, the amended complaint contains no factual 

allegations against him. This is insufficient.

V. CONCLUSION

For the foregoing reasons, the Court GRANTS Defendants’ motion to dismiss with leave 

to amend. Hayes may file a second amended complaint within 30 days.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

Dated: March 28, 2019

THOMAS S. HIXSON

United States Magistrate Judge

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