SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – It’s not our fault if you got scammed, Facebook is telling the plaintiffs who brought a proposed class action lawsuit that argues otherwise.
The social media giant’s Oct. 8 motion to dismiss says Facebook is not liable for claims arising from third-party conduct and does not owe any duty to its users that would create liability for their poor decisions.
“Rather than suing the merchants who allegedly defrauded them, or the creators of the allegedly fraudulent advertisements, Plaintiffs seek to hold Facebook liable. But Plaintiffs do not allege that Facebook created the ads that allegedly led Plaintiffs to third-party websites to make their purchases, that Plaintiffs purchased any product through Facebook, or that Plaintiffs ever paid any money to Facebook,” the motion says.
“Nor do they allege that Facebook was involved in the relevant purchase transactions. To the contrary, Plaintiffs expressly concede that Facebook’s advertising policies ‘strictly prohibit[]’ the posting of false and misleading ads, and that Facebook took down the merchants’ pages after Plaintiffs notified Facebook of the potentially fraudulent conduct.”
While Facebook does not pay users for the data it collects from them, this data has enormous financial value and enables Facebook to sell precisely targeted ads to millions of advertisers, the suit says.
Scammers discovered they could exploit these targeting capabilities to get deceptive, false and/or misleading ads viewed by the Facebook users most likely to click those ads and be lured into bait-and-switch and other fraudulent schemes, the suit says.
One of the plaintiffs alleges he did not receive what he purchased from one such advertiser, and the other plaintiff says she received a different product from the one she ordered.
The Communications Decency Act protects Facebook, the motion says, because the company did not create the content that led the plaintiffs to their purchases. Facebook is also says the complaint fails to allege a contractual obligation or tort duty to its users that it breached.
“Plaintiffs fail to allege any causal connection between Facebook’s purported conduct and their alleged harm,” the motion says. “This fundamental flaw is fatal to all their claims.”