There are times when it’s great to know that you have a billionaire who suffers from the same social and economic injustice at the hands of a big, global company that can snub its nose at your requests for a fair go. And it’s especially so when the government regulators seem powerless to genuinely help you.
But wait, there’s more to this point — it’s particularly worrying when the consequences of the regulators’ apparent powerless means ordinary ‘money-unsophisticated’ Australians could lose money by being scammed!
With all this in mind and knowing that my image, my voice and my videos on YouTube have been manipulated by scum, lowlife scam merchants to offer a stock-tipping service, and despite action by the ACCC and my connections within Meta to take these ads down from Facebook, they continue to pop up!
That’s why I cheered this morning when Reuters reported that a “…US judge rejected Meta Platforms' bid to dismiss a lawsuit by billionaire Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest over scam Facebook advertisements that show him promoting fake cryptocurrency and other fraudulent investments”.
Andrew Twiggy Forrest, of course, is the Fortescue Metals’ founder and chairman, and it’s only because of his deep pockets and his insistence that his name not be used by criminals, that a precedence could be created to stop Meta’s ‘indirect’ role in this crime. A win in a US court would open the door for people like him and yours truly, along with the likes of David Koch, Nine’s Richard Wilkins and others, who could see an end to these abuses to our names and possible compensation from Meta, or more importantly, the stopping of people potentially losing money to these criminals, who use images and reputations of others to scam people.
Only if Meta is set to lose money would the company put in place better systems to stamp out this shocking behaviour, which the company is an accessory to by allowing these scam ads to reappear.
In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), it would seem unlikely that a hi-tech company such as Meta couldn’t program a filtering system to stop these criminal acts.
Back to the legal breakthrough, and Reuters says “U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts in San Jose, California said Australia's second-richest person can try to prove that Meta's negligence in allowing the ads breached its duty to operate in a commercially reasonable manner”.
Even better, Twiggy can “… also try to prove that his name and likeness was misappropriated by Meta, and not just by fraudsters behind the bogus ads”.
The judge says Meta gained a material or financial advantage by using Twiggy’s image.
There is a famous old line that says that anything is legal in the US as long as 100 businessmen say it is. Meta has used Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act to say that as a publisher of third-party content, they haven’t broken any laws allowing scam merchants to use other people’s brands for illegal acts.
On finding that out, you could be excused for uttering the old line: “Only in America!”
The judge concluded that a future court case will be decided on whether Meta just provides neutral tools that bad people misused or whether Meta’s tools “themselves contributed to the content of the ads."
Importantly, Forrest argues more than 1,000 of the ads appeared on Facebook in Australia between April and November 2023, which resulted in millions of dollars in losses for victims.
And he wants not only a win but a dollar slapping for Meta in the form of compensation and punitive damages.
By the way, in April, local prosecutors weren’t supportive of Twiggy suing Meta in an Australian court, so this win, out of town, is a victory of Olympic proportions, though the gold medal can only come if he wins the next round in a US court.
All I can say, from the bottom of my heart, is: “Go Twiggy!”