Technology

Facebook Being Sued In Britain More Intelligently Than Anything The U.S. Senate Has Contemplated

Facebook can run circles around our stupid Senate, but a private citizen in the U.K. understands what rots at Facebook.

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Martin Lewis, the U.K. “Money Saving Expert,” is suing Facebook over its advertising practices, and it’s glorious. Unlike the United States Senate, it’s like Martin Lewis actually understands what Facebook does, and has an idea of how it could do it better.

The core of the lawsuit is fake ads. People pay Facebook to post ads that use Martin Lewis’s face and moniker. These ads are not authorized by Lewis. He’s sick of it.

Lewis has gone through all of the normal procedures. When he sees a fake ad, he contacts Facebook. Facebook takes some days to remove the ad. Then, another ad pops up. Lewis wants Facebook to stop all of this fake advertising without him having to play whack-a-mole. He’s actually making this pretty easy for Facebook: “I do not appear in adverts, full-stop — no company pays me to do an advert. I have made this clear to Facebook — any ad with me in it is fake.” If we know that every Facebook ad with Martin Lewis in it is fake, it should be comparatively easy for Facebook to stop Facebook advertising in his name.

Of course, Facebook has not stopped the fake adverts, and so Lewis feels he’s forced to sue.

Facebook is doing all of its usual things: it argues that it’s not a “publisher” and aren’t responsible for verifying ads before they go live. It argues that it has effective complaint procedures for people like Lewis to use. It argues that it was “working with” Lewis to address the problem.

What it’s not doing is accepting liability for false advertising on its platform.

Lewis thinks it should:

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“They’re the ones being paid, they’re the ones who should take responsibility and police it,” he said.

The legal action follows intense media scrutiny over the company’s duties as a de-facto publishing platform.

“Politicians have discussed the democratic deficit because of fake news on social media – well it may be more prosaic, but real, vulnerable people are losing money because of fake ads.”

You’d expect American regulators to be sensitive to the “prosaic” concerns of real people losing real money. But that requires them to understand how Facebook works, and how Facebook could work better. We don’t seem to have that kind of institutional knowledge in this country.

But maybe our British cousins can show us the way. Facebook has the ability to stop these fake ads. The question is simply whether or not anybody is going to make them.

Martin Lewis seeks damages for ‘fake’ Facebook ads [BBC]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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