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OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist: lawsuits
- stuaxo 4y agoWow, just when you think you've heard the worst thing an internet company can do, something like this happens.
- helllbooyas 4y ago
- demarq 4y agoThis is some next level of evil
- twawaaay 4y agoNah, it is just regular greed combined with lack of scrupules and slightly larger than average budget.
- bhaney 4y ago> greed combined with lack of scrupules and slightly larger than average budget Sounds like evil to me
- twawaaay 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0NgUhEs1R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0NgUhEs1R4
- tomuli38 4y agoThis kind of implies you do not find greed and a lack of scruples to be evil.
- twawaaay 4y agoNo, it does not. I just don't find it to be "next level" of evil.
- tomuli38 4y agoGetting people put on terror watch lists is not introductory level evil. We are talking about destroying lives, not ruining someone's day.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twawaaay 4y agoSo we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen. They also knowingly exploit base emotions of literally billions of people to antagonise them just to keep them "engaged" and sell some ad space. I call this "next level" evil. Regular evil is, where I live, a small developer (housing) went bankrupt and wasted life savings of hundreds of people. They did a lot of absolutely mind boggling stupid stuff and they knew they are running out of cash and still accepted payments from more people. Given history of these cases here, they are unlikely to ever spend even a day in jail and the most it ever gets is couple of mentions in local news.
- tomuli38 4y agoI feel like I am taking crazy pills having this conversation. Regular evil is letting the air out of someone's tires or lying to your spouse, not wasting away the life savings of hundreds of people.
- zimpenfish 4y ago> So we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen If you want a proper "Facebook is evil" point, there's always the Rohingya genocide[1] -- "Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar" [1] https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/rohingya-facebook-hate-speech/ https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/r...
- heavyset_go 4y agoBanality of evil and all that.
- _trampeltier 4y agoAs always. What could go wrong with a such setup. > The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list — much less how or why
- riedel 4y agoWe didn't read enough dystopian novels yet to that describe the privatisation of law enforcement. We wanted the real thing.
- 93po 4y agoLaw enforcement started out privatized, and has basically always existed mainly for the benefit of the privileged private class.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- contingencies 4y ago+1 insightful. Also, Ancient Egyptian Police Had Trained Monkeys https://www.ranker.com/list/police-in-ancient-societies/mike-rothschild https://www.ranker.com/list/police-in-ancient-societies/mike...
- 93po 4y agoHaving a trained monkey try to chase you down (presumably with a weapon) sounds terrifying, yet somehow I'm not convinced it would be all together worse than what we have now
- m-p-3 4y ago
- buscoquadnary 4y agoIt seems like for all the effort we've put into stopping terrorism it's primarily being used against our own citizens rather than to stop any actual terrorism.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoIt only happens every single time.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoThere is no incentive to stop terrorists beyond doing the bare minimum to cover one's ass. It's not like anything bad happens for the government. They just get more power every time.
- nickff 4y agoThe most extreme examples of this are countries like Pakistan, which derive a great deal of foreign aid from their ongoing 'conflicts' with terror-related groups in outlying territory. Pakistan has very little incentive to ever 'win'.
- bhaney 4y agoIt's such a shame that nobody predicted exactly that
- slfnflctd 4y agoRuss Feingold will always have major points for this in my book. Only senator to vote against the 'Patriot Act'.
- lampshades 4y agoI was just curious because I'd never heard or thought about who voted for the Patriot Act. I don't even know who Feingold is but he gets points in my book now too. If anyone else is interested, here is the actual vote: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1071/vote_107_1_00313.htm https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
- rmatt2000 4y agoIf a private individual can do this, imagine how easy it is for the U.S. government to suppress content that it doesn't like on social media.
- worik 4y agoHarder for the state, in the USA. The constitution has something to say about that (IANAL)
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoAre you implying that the TLAs follow the law? Because their track record says otherwise.
- cestith 4y agoHarder does not mean impossible. There's more scrutiny and more recourse when the government does it, but you're right it doesn't always stop them.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoOn paper, sure. In practice government doesn't really have to worry about government trying to make an example out of them though and has access to the kind of violence and benefit of the doubt evil corporations could only dream of. Frankly I think it's a bit naive to imply that big government organizations aren't just as evil and terrible and self serving as big corporate ones. Their error bars of evil overlap a lot.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonhohle 4y agoThere is also very little consequence for the gov and very little recourse for the citizen in practice. In the event that someone has the resources to challenge the government, any victory is blunted by the award coming from their (and all of our) tax dollars.
- humanistbot 4y agoThis is from February, when the BBC reported it [1]. This recent article from The NY Post doesn't seem to add much more, other than that the judge set the trial for September. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60029508 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60029508
- sio8ohPi 4y ago> the judge set the trial for September. This is incorrect. September is a hearing on defendants' motions to dismiss. Not especially relevant, but of mild interest: this case is with Judge Alsup (of Oracle v Google).
- 3np 4y agoThe BBC reporting only mentions a lawsuit targeting OnlyFans, with subpoenas for Meta, and quotes hinting at more to come. According to OP, Meta is now also a defendant.
- seydor 4y agoLittle by little , social media companies are replacing the functions of the state. When will the beatings begin
- ben_w 4y ago1892, if not before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
- makerofthings 4y agoWell that wiki page was a wild ride. I don't completely see how it relates, but it was worth reading. I will think about this next time I see complaining on slack about perks being removed :)
- eternalban 4y ago"In the years after the failure of the Homestead strike, O'Donnell found himself --blackballed-- from returning to work in the steel industry. Needing to adopt a new career, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a newspaper reporter.[12] In about 1903, O'Donnell accepted a position in government employment as a deputy to the Pennsylvania state factory inspector.[13] This job placed O'Donnell in crowded Pennsylvania tenements and poorly ventilated factories on a regular basis, and he subsequently contracted tuberculosis as a result.[14] Stricken seriously ill by the disease, in November 1905 O'Donnell left the Northeast for the warmer and drier climate of the Southwest, accompanied by relatives, in an effort to regain his health.[14] Newspaper accounts from December of that year place O'Donnell in the city of El Paso, Texas.[15]" [--emph added--]
- skybrian 4y agoBecause people insist that Something Must Be Done and the state's not doing it. Even EU regulators don't want to do things, they want to push big tech firms to do it. Beatings are unlikely though. It's not something you can do with a datacenter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- m00x 4y agoSelling sex content is also disallowed under Meta's platforms. This could possibly just be a manual error of the person banning the accounts and entering the wrong reason. Reminder that the suit alleges, and does not prove that OnlyFans did this. Wait until the result of the suit to throw down criticism of the system.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y agoManual error thousands of times?
- m00x 4y agoDo you know how many they have to do? Thousands could be 0.0001%.
- cabirum 4y agoIs that the same database Apple uses to scan image hashes on iPhones without user consent?
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoApple isn't listed as a member. https://gifct.org/membership/ https://gifct.org/membership/
- wmf 4y agoNo, terrorism and child porn are separate databases.
- phkahler 4y agoThis seems like a surprisingly specific allegation: >> They claim the bribes were routed from OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International, through a secret Hong Kong subsidiary into offshore Philippines bank accounts set up by the crooked Meta employees, potentially including at least one unnamed senior executive. If that's true, how would they know? And if not, why would they think they know it?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yieldcrv 4y agoa secret Hong Kong subsidiary would have a non-secret name, do any of the court filings name it? if so, why not the journalist? kickbacks to big tech employees isn't new or novel, just curious about why the omission of details
- mr_toad 4y ago> If that's true, how would they know? Someone ratted them out?
- sio8ohPi 4y agoThey don't. Read claims 75-85: https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3629&context=historical https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Note that "on information and belief" is lawyeresse for "we don't know this is true, we only have suspicion". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 (as well as a lot of the complaint) are so hedged. The claims they're not hedging are more limited: basically "Meta employees were paid to update a database of dangerous individuals and organizations, and Meta shared this database with others (75)" and "OnlyFans' parent company Fenix has a presence in Hong Kong and other countries (78-81)". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 must be true... because the alternative would be devastating to their case /s. There is very little of substance in the complaint. In all seriousness, I think plaintiffs have read public sentiment against tech companies, and I imagine their strategy here is to throw as much mud as they can, bamboozle some credulous journalists, and hope Meta et al settle to avoid bad PR.
- rootsudo 4y ago
- gmiller123456 4y agoImportant to note this is a "terror watchlist" run by a private entity, not a government. It's largely just used by social media to flag groups and account sharing copies of images flagged by them. If the allegations are true, still not a good thing, but "terror watchlist" makes it sound a lot worse than it is.
- tailspin2019 4y ago"watchlist" seems to be an altogether incorrect term for this in the first place. I guess they probably didn't want to use the term "blacklist" but I'm not sure what the correct term should now be. Watchlist evokes the meaning "this person is being watched by [authorities]" Edit: The BBC article (linked here in comments) did in fact use the term "blacklist". GIFCT calls it a "hash-sharing database". The use of "terror watchlist" by NY Post seems to be more clickbait rather than accuracy driven. (Not that this issue isn't pretty terrible).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- upupandup 4y agoYour argument is akin to telling someone who was falsely reported to the bank, a private entity, which is then required to share it to authorities. All these apologists suddenly coming out of the woodwork from inactive accounts is just a series of pattern I'm noticing more and more not only on HN but in all public discourse platforms. It's highly likely that corporations and high networth individuals have realized the power of astroturfing to skew public opinions, especially when most of those audiences do not read past the sensationalized titles.
- pessimizer 4y agoIt's a list that enables an industry to cooperate with each other in order to better comply with a government demand. A government demand that they have been threatened with regulation if they don't sufficiently comply with it themselves.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoAnd this is in an essence why demoting content is difficult.
- lizardactivist 4y agoVery peculiar accusations, and it makes no sense that these third parties, not directly involved in the alleged payment scheme, would have come upon all this information. False accusations, possibly also made-up charges.
- marcinzm 4y agoFor anyone interested, this seems to be the lawsuit in questions and it has all the details people are asking for but the journalists don't include: https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3629&context=historical https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
- everybodyknows 4y agoThe plaintiff's law firm looks to be plenty high-powered: https://milberg.com/about-us/ https://milberg.com/about-us/
- commandlinefan 4y agoThe only way to avoid having censorship lists be abused is to stop having censorship lists.
- cmeacham98 4y agoUnless you're a fan of spam/scams/etc running rampant on every platform we're going to need "censorship lists". So inject some nuance and talk about what types are ok and what types aren't.
- maltalex 4y agoRight, throw the baby out with the bathwater. "The only to avoid having laws be abused is to stop having laws". Listen, I don't like censorship as much as the next guy. But in the real world, lists and platforms without some sort of moderation become of cesspool of the worst that society has to offer.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
- sneak 4y agoThe only way to stop having society-wide censorship lists is to stop using centralized media and centralized social networks. So long as there is only one chokepoint for widespread automated censorship, the state will illegally censor things it doesn't like.
- azinman2 4y agoYes having ISIS propaganda decentralized for sure makes for a better world. /s There are bad people who do bad things, and to say let’s just ignore this because things I don’t want to happen are is ignoring the realities and difficulties of the world. It’s not black and white, and bad things will be done in the name of action.
- pessimizer 4y ago
- ElonsNightmare 4y agoshut that psyop down yesterday.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeffwask 4y agoThere was a story that came out of a podcast with a couple adult entertainers in the LA/SF area that I think made the rounds here as well that connects nicely to this. She alleged that her account kept getting shadow banned and she couldn't get it resolved so she started stalking Facebook/Insta mods and sleeping with them to get unbanned. Good stuff... monopolies are bad.
- pid_0 4y ago
- thepasswordis 4y agoHuman traffickers engage in shitty behavior. Shocking.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoMeta obliged... that's more interesting.
- throw_m239339 4y ago> Human traffickers engage in shitty behavior. Shocking. Exactly, it demonstrates once again that digital pimps are just like the regular pimps. But hey "it's just an app"... Absolutely evil.
- aquanext 4y agoWell this sounds incredibly horrible in every conceivable way.
- mccorrinall 4y agoAnd there is no evidence to prove this as the article shows. The headline is clickbait.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alchemyromcom 4y agoThis must be one of the most awful sentences I've ever read. There is so much stink crammed into so few words, that I'm actually slightly in awe of how terrible it is. There are so many ways its bad that it feels like a rich knot of bad actions that you could unravel for a whole day and never be bored. At the same time, one of the biggest headlines today is about how Zuckerberg thinks WFH is wrong. I'll tell you something: this is is what's wrong. The people involved in whatever this was should be the ones to be fired most of all.
- dang 4y agoOk, but please don't fulminate on HN. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gzer0 4y agoThis is quite concerning, from the lawsuit itself [1]: The blacklisting process was accomplished first internally at Instagram/Facebook by automated classifiers or filters, which were then submitted to a shared industry database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints. This database was and is intended to flag and remove content produced by terrorists and related “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” to curtail the spread of terrorism and violent extremism online. Where can one learn more about this database? Who decides what goes into this database? Is there a governance process? How about incorrectly identified items? We are headed back into the times of "guilty, until proven innocent" versus how it should be, "innocent until proven guilty". If the scenario was the following: letting 10 criminals go free, or having 1 innocent person imprisoned, I would always choose the latter. [1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3629&context=historical https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
- leaflets2 4y agoAlways choose 1 innocent person imprisoned? I guess you meant the "former" not the "latter" :-) Interesting with the hashes. Seems impossible to detect such "poisoning of the hashes" i wonder if anyone with access could ... Submit a hash of a profile photo of someone, to cause him/hey troubles?
- simanyay 4y agoI believe its managed by the GIFCT: https://gifct.org/ https://gifct.org/
- sbuccini 4y agoThis is exactly what it is. Last I heard, a small team within FB was responsible for actually running the service itself but it could have gotten spun out since then.
- phendrenad2 4y agoOh lovely, you have to pay to get a copy of the list. Gotta make sure only the entrenched big tech companies can effectively filter out extremist content, huh?
- mjfl 4y agoHow is this a civil matter and not criminal?
- Throwawayaerlei 4y agoFor it to be criminal you've got to convince a prosecutor with relevant authority to take up the case.
- madrox 4y agoI'm curious how they know bribery happened. According to the lawsuit details another commenter linked, it outlines a suspicious chain of events but no evidence of actual bribery from what I skimmed through. Maybe that's just how it works and they hope to learn more in discovery though.
- michaelt 4y agoPresumably you don't bribe the sysadmins in the US making six-figure salaries. Instead you bribe the outsourced moderators in Kenya who get paid $2/hour to wade through beheading videos to just occasionally misclick. And presumably you don't pay the bribes directly - you hire a 'reputation management consultant' who takes care of all the dirty work. Then if the news comes out, you can claim you thought they were improving your reputation by sponsoring orphanages or something.
- Tyndale 4y agoThey're porn peddlers. Do you expect them to act like boy scouts?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skyyler 4y agoPorn peddlers like Larry Flynt did a lot of work in defending First amendment rights...
- ncmncm 4y agoSeems like the right response to these blacklists, if they can't be curtailed, is to put literally everyone on them. After, the lists can't be used for anything.
- jollybean 4y agoI suggest OF is the bigger bad actor here, this is not really a META story.
- im3w1l 4y agoIf they can be bribed once they can be bought twice. And it's a reminder to everyone that if you aren't getting the engagement your content deserves then it's a possibility that you are being deliberately sabotaged.
- jollybean 4y agoMETA was not bribed. Individuals were bribed, that's a monster difference. Also, if you're not getting 'engagement' it's 99.999% chance that something other than 'bribery' is happening. Shenanigans are common, but this specific kind is not very common. I'm doubtful people at META are going in on some schemes like this.
- jessaustin 4y agoShenanigans are common, but this specific kind is not very common. How could anyone know that? No government cares to investigate this sort of thing, and those individuals who could become aware would mostly be subject to NDA.
- jollybean 4y agoBecause it's not hard to figure out 'something' is going on, and, the level of 'bribery' in general for these kinds of things at above board corporations is rare.
- jessaustin 4y ago"Not hard" for whom? The individual private porn producers? ITT you specifically disbelieve those exact people! Only those who work in the right positions within Meta or one of these other horrible companies would have a good view into this, and they have no incentive to set things right.
- ENOTTY 4y agoI suppose this is the dual to the OnlyFans creator who slept with Meta employees to get unbanned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447396 I think the takeaway from both of these stories is that Meta employees are easily bribed and perhaps some more internal controls are needed to prevent abuse of these platform features.
- big_norse 4y ago
- faangiq 4y agoToday in Not The Onion …
- michaelkeenan 4y agoI've read (most of) the lawsuit[1] and unless I'm missing something, the allegations seem to be entirely guesswork, and the sex worker bans across multiple websites can be entirely explained by the SESTA/FOSTA law of 2018. The lawsuit notes that in 2018, many adult entertainers were banned from various platforms, such as Instagram, and gives some examples. It then alleges (without evidence) that OnlyFans (and MyFreeCams) models didn't experience such bans. From this, they guess (without evidence) a conspiracy: that the people behind OnlyFans and MyFreeCams conspired with Meta employees to automatically filter out their competitors, and they speculate (without evidence) that there might have been payments routed through an offshore company. 2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users." The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers. The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019." The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments." I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits". [1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3629&context=historical https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=sesta%2Ffosta&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- BroadbandSurfer 4y agoI can barely pay attention to these kinda stories anymore... Anyone could make this shit up just as easily as it could be true, but we rarely ever get any bit of proof. Unless we dedicate our own selves into finding something to give us an idea of which it is..
- akudha 4y agoOf all the people who worked on this, nobody thought it was illegal or land them in trouble? Like, how does one come up with a plan like this, sell it to their colleagues and see it through to completion? The level of entitlement ("laws don't apply to me" or "at most there is going to be a small fine, no big deal" etc) is mind boggling. We can't expect our corporate overlords to behave ethically, now even expecting them to behave legally is too much to ask, I guess
- dotcoma 4y agoGod, guns and smut made America free. Then someone bribed Meta…