The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday rejected Facebook's effort to avoid a Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Facebook had argued that a recent amendment to the law, which excepted calls seeking to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the federal government from the TCPA's ban on robocalls to cell phones, made the statute an unconstitutional content-based restriction on speech. The court agreed with Facebook but held that the argument didn't do Facebook any good: The remedy the court gave was to sever and invalidate the government-debt exception while leaving the rest of the statute intact. In so doing, the court followed a Fourth Circuit decision from earlier this year.
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