Woman sues Facebook for phony nude pictures

Consider suing Facebook soon if you ever had a traumatising experience resulting from an unwarranted publicity, don’t be too quick to go to the jury. Wait for the success of an attempt to do same by a Houston woman Maryem Ali who  alleges that “ex-friend” Adeel Shah Khan started an “imposter Facebook site” that featured Photoshopped photos of Ms. Ali’s head attached to “false, phony, naked body shots,” and one photo where she is “in a graphic, pornographic-like photo purporting to be in the middle of a sexual act.”
Ms. Ali is seeking “full justice” against Facebook and Mr. Khan for the “significant trauma, extreme humiliation, extreme embarrassment, severe emotional disturbances and severe mental and physical suffering.” She is suing for $123 million — or 10 cents for every one of Facebook’s 1.23 billion users.


Although Facebook has declined to comment on the lawsuit, but the case has focused renewed attention on the efforts to combat so-called “revenge porn” and on the struggles the legal system has faced in obtaining justice for victims of sexual abuse and exploitation in the age of the Internet.

Revenge porn, also known as “cyber rape,” is the distribution of nude or sexually explicit content without the consent of the individual pictured. Typically, a couple will share sexually suggestive pictures or videos as a consensual act, but when the relationship ends, an angered ex will post the material online out of spite. The content is usually attached with personal information about the individual: phone number, links to social media profiles, address and employment. According to the petition filed July 25, Ms. Ali wasn’t aware of the photos until family and friends were invited to connect to the phony site in December 2013. Following months of requests to connect to the fake Ms. Ali’s Facebook page, the bogus page was removed after the Houston Police Department subpoenaed Facebook’s records. Ms. Ali alleges Facebook “failed to live up to its worldwide marketing and advertising promise” to take down fake sites in a timely fashion.

Her petition contends that Ms. Ali has endured “significant trauma, extreme humiliation, extreme embarrassment, severe emotional disturbances, and severe mental and physical suffering.”
Through this lawsuit Ms. Ali seeks to “expose the frailties and failures of the falsely advertised and false-promoted privacy mechanisms” of Facebook.

“Facebook’s upper management knows that its operations regularly allow for the compromising in significant way of the reasonable and expected privacy rights of its subscribers,” the suit argues. She went to court to make the company “stand up, take notice and pay attention to the serious privacy violations concerns involved in revenge porn situations.”

Legal hurdles
But Georgetown Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet said Ms. Ali’s arguments likely will not hold up in court unless the plaintiff can demonstrate a breach of contract under the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA).

“She can’t win those claims,” she said, noting the act legally protects websites from liability for user-generated content.

Credit huffingtonpost