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.
Section 230
Communications Decency Act Section 230 protects YouTube from liability for sharing terror-related content, and if those protections are eliminated, the internet could become a “litigation minefield,” Google argued before the Supreme Court Thursday in Gonzalez v. Google (docket 21-1333) (see 2212290055).
The Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 is “no shield” for the design, marketing and operations of social media platforms “that are harmful to youth,” alleged Kent School District No. 415 in suburban Seattle in a complaint Monday (docket 2:23-cv-00045) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington. It names ByteDance, Google, Meta, Snap and their various subsidiaries, including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, as defendants.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana should dismiss the Biden administration’s attempts to throw out a lawsuit from Republican state attorneys general claiming federal officials colluded with Big Tech to censor social media information, AGs from Missouri and Louisiana argued in a filing Friday (see 2212080048) and 2211220054) (docket 3:22-cv-01213).
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The Supreme Court should “narrow the scope” of Communications Decency Act Section 230 and reverse the 9th Circuit’s decision shielding YouTube from liability in Gonzalez v. Google (docket 21-1333), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) wrote in a merits-stage amicus brief announced Thursday (see 2212070026).
Gibson Dunn lawyers for DirecTV have nearly a dozen “nondelegable deadlines and obligations in connection with other active matters” that will prevent them from filing their opening brief in their Vance v. DirecTV appeal by the Jan. 23 deadline, said their unopposed motion Wednesday (docket 22-2041) at the 4th U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals seeking a one-week extension. Their obligations include drafting an amicus brief in a case on the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that's due at the Supreme Court by Jan. 19, said the motion. DirecTV is appealing the U.S. District Court for West Virginia decision certifying the class in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint as including all people in the U.S. who received calls to promote DirecTV on numbers listed on the do not call registry. DirecTV argued unsuccessfully that the district court lacked personal jurisdiction over the claims of class members who were called outside West Virginia, that individualized issues would predominate over class ones, and that the three named plaintiffs were subject to defenses that made them inadequate class representatives.
A woman who shared social media posts of two California high school students allegedly engaging in racist, blackface activity after the 2020 killing of George Floyd isn’t liable for defamation of the students because she’s protected by Communications Decency Act Section 230, California’s Court of Appeal for the First Appellate District ruled Thursday, affirming a trial court’s decision.
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The online marketplace Letgo isn’t liable for the murders of a husband and wife who were killed when trying to buy a used car through the platform, the U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled in a Dec. 5 decision (docket 22-cv-00899). Though the court sided with the company in dismissing the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty said Letgo isn’t entitled to liability protection under Communications Decency Act Section 230 at this stage.