Facebook is being sued by a Qatari billionaire over fake cryptocurrency ads. Wassam Al Mana, ex-husband of pop icon Janet Jackson, filed a lawsuit against the social media website in a Dublin court. Al Mana took issue with the fact that said cryptocurrency ads that promoted fake investments were featuring his name and his image, aimed at investors in the Middle East. In his lawsuit he is claiming defamation, malicious falsehood and false advertising by a crypto company which was facilitated through Facebook’s network. Apart from having been married to Janet Jackson at some point, Wassam Al Mana is the executive director of Al Mana Group, which is a Qatari conglomerate that operates mainly in Bahrain,Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Al Mana’s networth is estimated to be over $1 billion. I can’t say I blame him for filing such a lawsuit considering the harm such ads could do to his reputation.
He has no business suing Facebook. That's like suing air for passing a virus. Maybe he should also sue the Internet, Adobe/Photoshop, and whatever other tools the crooks used to create and distribute his images. And I'm sure the crooks didn't use only Facebook. Courts shouldn't even allowed this, or all websites will be sued for someone uploading a wrong picture, and no business will be able to function online. He needs to sue the people that hurt him, not some unrelated online biz.
Not the same thing. Facebook is directly earning from fraudulent ads. They absolutely have control over all the ads that are displayed, so your attempt at portraying them as the victim is hilarious. On top of that, it's the burning trash pile of the internet - Facebook.
Yes, but once a legal precedent is established then it will be quoted in future lawsuits and the same arguments will be used to sue every small website, and there will be plenty of predatory lawyers suing everyone. Courts cannot apply laws differently to FB than other websites. This issue bothers me because I was previously sued by a predatory lawyer for having a website lacking some specific level of security. It was total bs and the same lawyer sued 1000s of websites asking for small settlement but later got sued himself by the state of California for predatory business practices. Anyway, the fact is that the law specifically cannot allow online businesses to be responsible for how their platforms are being used (to some extent), and they can not verify every picture being used in some ad campaign, otherwise the internet would fall apart. But it may work in Qatar with a rich billionaire controlling courts.
You aren't differentiating between content that is created on a site by users and paid ads that the site is running. I have been in your shoes as well and can tell you I'd have absolutely zero problem with a precedent that made anyone who sold ads for a living responsible for those ads not containing illegal content. It would have zero impact on the vast legal internet businesses, except possibly to enhance the internet experience for everyone and thereby create value for them.
It depends on how the law is written in Dublin. That lawsuit wouldn't last 5 minutes in a USA court, if that. Here in the U.S. we have a very specific law that covers this issue, which is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In a nutshell, an interactive service like Facebook is held harmless from material that is published through its system by users of the site. So if a user submitted advertising copy and images to Facebook's backend ad system that were false, defamatory, or otherwise harmful to another person or entity, then our law says that 100% of the responsibility for that content is placed on the user who submitted it, not the service the content was published through. This law prevents sites like google, Facebook and many others from getting sued every 5 seconds for content that is posted through their services by the latest daily nutcases, psychopaths, extremists, etc.
Google allows any website to display ads that are simply setup by any advertiser using Google technology (AdWords). Google may not even display those ads, so only millions of websites could be sued under pretense that they only used Google as a tool to select advertisers. Adobe/Photoshop also profits from people creating “illegal images”. While ads are just one category of images that can be used for commercial gain. Online design tools would also be sued for profiting from “illegal images” used to create online ads. Creative lawyers would find ways to sue anyone they want, as every website can be shown to gain $0.01 from by displaying or allowing an ad to be posted to it. There are too many reasons that US laws can’t even allow such bs lawsuits.
Google is the entity who collects the payment from the advertiser, it's trivial to make them the responsible party and clearly delineate that in the law. And again, the Adobe example is pretty trivial to write out as well. Simply write a law that states that if you received money directly from an advertiser in exchange for distributing their ad you're responsible for ensuring that ad doesn't break any laws. The fact that a poorly written law could have unintended consequences is no reason to argue against a well written law!
That would simply legalize Google’s monopoly on ads. Anyone should be able to compete with Google and without legal and research teams trying to find the source of every image in an ad. Actually that’s even impossible for Google, as I’ve ran a photo studio and stock photo website for several years where we’ve created 200k images, half with people’s faces, now on Shutterstock, and many used in Google ads. There is no way for anyone to validate that I’m the source of those images used in Google ads, unless involving several people at several companies, for every image on billions of ads. An ad would cost $200 just to setup, but millions of ads are now generated every minute and you can’t roll back the advancement of technology. And there can be several images used in an ad, and not always clearly distinguishable between mix of images. Neither small or large ad website could survive a requirement of verifying legality of ads.
You're thinking too linearly. If Google is now responsible for illegal actions in ads, they start to require companies to indemnify Google before posting ads through Google. Google of course realizes that a shell company indemnifying them provides no protection, so they stop dealing with shell companies. Maybe start requiring companies show proof of insurance to cover the indemnity before they're allowed to post ads. And poof, a whole cesspool of sham entities with bad actors evaporates overnight, with almost no impact on real, legitimate advertisers. Would that slow down the current wild west of online advertising and probably hurt profits for the big ad companies? Sure. Is that a reason not to do it? I don't think so.