Adult performers saw their Instagram accounts falsely tagged as containing terrorist content -- crippling their ability to promote their business and devastating their incomes, according to the suits.

Sellers of smutty pictures were then "shadowbanned" across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other sites, the suits allege. Targeted accounts also included businesses, celebrities, influencers and others who "have nothing to do with terrorism," according to the suits. [...]

The plaintiffs claim the scheme dates back to 2018, when they say one or more Meta employees -- potentially including an unnamed senior executive -- took bribes from OnlyFans.

They claim the bribes were routed from OnlyFans' parent company, Fenix International, through a secret Hong Kong subsidiary into offshore Philippines bank accounts set up by the crooked Meta employees, potentially including at least one unnamed senior executive.

The suits -- which also name OnlyFans majority owner Leonid Radvinsky as a defendant -- claim the bribes paid off around October 2018, when people sold content through OnlyFans' rivals were allegedly hit with a "massive spike in content classification/filtering activity" that limited their reach. Meanwhile, users of OnlyFans enjoyed a "mysterious immunity" to the crackdown, the plaintiffs claim. [...]

The "Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism" was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google's YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a "hash" is shared across all its members.

In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list -- much less how or why.

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