Meta Denies Liability for All Claims in Adult Entertainer Class Action

Meta denies liability for all claims alleged in a second amended class action adult entertainers brought against the company and its Facebook and Instagram platforms alleging unfair competition, said Meta's response Friday (docket 3:22-cv-1101) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. In February, adult entertainers Dawn Dangaard, Kelly Gilbert and Jennifer Allbaugh sued Meta’s social media sites and Fenix International, which owns adult platform OnlyFans, and its owner Leonid Radvinsky, alleging the defendants colluded with OnlyFans competitors to blacklist them from Meta’s social media platforms. Until late 2018, the online adult entertainment industry was a competitive market, said the amended complaint, filed in September. Soon after Radvinsky’s purchase of OnlyFans in October 2018, plaintiffs saw a drop-off in traffic and user engagement on Meta’s social media platforms, the complaint said. The services deleted posts that plaintiffs used on the platform to drive traffic to their sites, and other posts were “hidden,” plaintiffs said. The number of click-throughs from those posts that appeared on social media services “dropped drastically,” they said. The reduced traffic and deletions were most noticeable on Instagram but also occurred on Twitter, Facebook, Snap and other mainstream platforms, the complaint alleged. Adult entertainment providers that had promoted exclusively on OnlyFans appeared to be unaffected by “automated takedowns and reduced traffic,” it said. In their response, Meta’s counsel said plaintiffs’ claims are barred in whole or in part by Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act, the First Amendment, Meta’s terms of services, the doctrines of waiver, the doctrines of unclean hands and the failure to mitigate damages.