According to a lawsuit filed by the APAG union, OnlyFans is accused of a bribery scheme involving Instagram executives to undercut its competition. The New York Post posted it today, and Twitter exploded with outraged performers.

According to the article, porn stars who used rival platforms saw their Instagram accounts falsely tagged as containing terrorist content — crippling their ability to promote their business and devastating their income.

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.

“When I heard that my content may be listed on the terror watch list, I was outraged,” Alana Evans, an adult performer and one of the plaintiffs in the California suit alongside Kelly Pierce and others, told The Post. “I was angry because it affected my income when my social media traffic dropped significantly, and I was angry because I am the daughter of a veteran who fought for this country.”

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.

Meta did not respond to requests for comment but told the BBC, which first reported the bribery allegations, that it had investigated and found no evidence the terror database had been abused.

“These allegations are without merit, and we will address them in the context of the litigation as needed,” Meta said.

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 blacklisting of plaintiff and others has caused OnlyFans to achieve a drastically enlarged market share while its competitors stagnated or declined,” attorneys in a class action led by OnlyFans competitor JustFor.Fans wrote in an August court filing in California state court. “The defendants engaged in a scheme to misuse a terrorist blacklist to obtain a competitive advantage.”

The suits include the California superior court filing court on behalf of JustFor.Fans and a California federal court suit on behalf of a group of several women led by the Adult Performing Artists Guild. In June, Meta asked a judge to throw out the federal suit. Hearings in both cases are slated for September.

Another suit filed in Broward county, Florida, on behalf of adult site FanCentro lists OnlyFans as a defendant but does not name Meta.

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.

“Due to the proliferation of the GIFCT database, any mistaken classification of a video, picture or post as ‘terrorist’ content echoes across social media platforms, undermining users’ right to free expression on several platforms at once,” Electronic Frontier Foundation researchers Svea Windwehr and Jillian C. York wrote in 2020.

“While [the GIFCT’s system] sounds like an efficient approach to the challenging task of correctly identifying and taking down terrorist content, it also means that one single database might be used to determine what is permissible speech and what is taken down — across the entire Internet,” the researchers added.

It’s hard to say exactly how many porn stars were mistakenly listed on the terrorist watch list, but we expect that data to come out during the trial. I reached out to OnlyFans for a comment, but I got no response (as expected).

We’ll keep you updated as more information about this case becomes available. In the meantime, be sure and follow the APAG Union on Twitter at @apagunion.