Xerox unit sues Facebook, Twitter over COVID-19 fakes identifier
A subsidiary of Xerox has accused Facebook, Twitter and Snap of infringing patents through their core functionalities, including the tools the social media companies use to help stop the spread of fake news.
In suits filed yesterday, November 25, at the US District Court for the Central District of California, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) claimed that the social media companies’ functions, including targeted advertising, notifications and systems that identify false or misleading information, infringed a set of patents.
PARC claimed that Facebook has infringed seven patents, Twitter has infringed six patents, and Snap has infringed three patents.
The Xerox subsidiary claimed that it has “been at the forefront of technological innovation for over 50 years”, inventing the first personal computer, the laser printer and ethernet.
According to the suit, many issues have plagued the social media companies since their foundations, including how to serve targeted, relevant advertisements, and challenges to the integrity of users’ social network feeds.
“Because PARC was at the nucleus of the idea that later birthed the internet, it anticipated many of these issues before they began to plague Twitter. And PARC’s ground-breaking artificial intelligence—which has been a focus of PARC engineers since well before Twitter existed—forms the backbone of many of these solutions, including those described in the PARC patents,” said the suit filed against Twitter.
The suits went on to outline Twitter and Facebook’s work stemming the false, misleading, and exploitative information about COVID-19.
“In April 2020, Facebook weeded out and flagged 50 million false posts and 2.5 million exploitative ads for COVID-19 related products such as personal protective equipment and testing kits,” said PARC, adding that Facebook’s machine-learning tools and algorithms infringe US patent number 7,167,871.
The patent covers a system and method of determining the reliability of a document based on its textual contents. Twitter is also allegedly infringing the patent, by taking steps to automate its misinformation processes related to COVID-19.
In the suits, the Xerox unit has asked the court for injunctive relief and damages.
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