Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel. He claims that CBD advertisers featured his name, photo, and likeness in Facebook ads. An example of the ads is displayed on the right. As a result of these ads, allegedly “Governor Huckabee is now wrongly associated with the CBD industry.”
Huckabee sued Facebook for publicity rights violations and more. Facebook defended on Section 230. The District of Delaware court follows the Anderson v. TikTok case eliminating Section 230 in the Third Circuit, but nevertheless dismisses Huckabee’s case on the prima facie elements.
Note the court could have possibly avoided engaging the Anderson precedent at all. Publicity rights claims should be “intellectual property” claims in the Third Circuit per the Hepp v. Facebook case, so it’s not clear that Facebook could have qualified for Section 230 for much of the complaint (the rest could have been resolved on the prima facie elements). Instead, the court doesn’t discuss the 230 IP exception at all. My intuition suggests that the judge went out of his way to reach out to the Section 230 issue even though it was eminently avoidable.
The Arkansas publicity rights statute requires scienter on the part of a “service provider of a system or network,” which I infer includes Facebook. Huckabee apparently never sent a takedown notice, and his other scienter allegations are insufficient.