A lawsuit filed in Florida alleges a conspiracy to torpedo traffic to rival FanCentro
OnlyFans has been wildly successful, so when the site said that it would drop the thing that made it famous — explicit content, a.k.a. porn — the backlash was strong enough to make the company rethink that decision. While attempting to get rid of adult content certainly made it seem like OnlyFans was ready for a big change, a lawsuit filed in Florida says that before it considered rebranding with a lot less skin, the company was up to some shady business to protect its place in the market, including putting content from some performers on… a terrorism blacklist?
The lawsuit was uncovered by the BBC and the allegations paint a portrait of a company playing serious hardball. How hard? Competing platform FanCentro claims that OnlyFans was paying a still-unidentified social media company to get content from some creators flagged in the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) database.
GIFCT was founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, with a mission of making it difficult for terrorists and extremists to use digital platforms. The organization does this by fingerprinting media identified as having terrorist associations. The founding companies (and Snapchat) share access to a database of that flagged content, making it easier for everyone to limit access to all kinds of extremism.
FanCentro claims that in finding a way to manipulate this database, OnlyFans was able to get some creators’ posts taken down unjustly and disable those user accounts — even though no terrorism-related content was actually involved. The suit says this happened on Instagram more than any other platform, and the effort ultimately succeeded at slowing down traffic to competitors. Tellingly, creators who linked to and promoted an OnlyFans profile didn’t run into any similar problems.
All that would be shady enough, but the suit also alleges OnlyFans reps bribed some employees of the unidentified company to put the plan in place. The BBC notes that Facebook wasn’t specifically mentioned in the lawsuit but shares that Meta has received a subpoena looking for internal documents related the case. FanCentro is requesting compensation for reduced traffic and money lost due to flagged posts. OnlyFans and Meta both told the BBC that there is no merit to the allegations.
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