Mailchimp Email Service Hit With FOSTA ‘Sex Trafficking’ Lawsuit

Annie McAdams, a personal-injury lawyer in Houston, Texas, is making a new specialty out of filing lawsuits against big tech companies under the provisions of the FOSTA/SESTA law passed overwhelmingly by Congress last year. The law weakens protections for online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is considered the foundation of free expression on the internet. Section 230 immunizes online platforms against offenses committed by third parties who post content using their services, as long as the platform exercises no editorial control over that content. Without the law, internet service providers, social media sites, and other content platforms would be faced with the prohibitive task of monitoring each and every post by anyone using those services, effectively killing the ability to post freely online. But FOSTA/SESTA took away those protections for content that allegedly promotes “sex trafficking.” As a result, sites such as Craigslist simply dumped any type of sexual content. McAdams earlier this year filed a pair of lawsuits against Facebook, on behalf of women who say that they became trafficking victims as a result of posts on the world’s largest social media site.  Last week, McAdams leveled a lawsuit at a new target: the email marketing service MailChimp, according to a report by BuzzFeed News. While the Facebook lawsuits were filed in Texas, McAdams filed the Mailchimp lawsuit in Georgia, alleging that her client was trafficked via the site YesBackpage, which bills itself as an alternative to the classified ad site Backpage. Backpage offered classified advertising to sexually related services and businesses. But the federal government shut the site down in April of 2018, arresting and indicting its founders and top executives, claiming that the site was a haven for online sex traffickers.   The “Jane Doe” plaintiff in the new lawsuit claims that she was victimized by a sex trafficker who responded to a YesBackpage marketing email sent via the MailChimp service, then forced her into sex-for-hire via the site itself. “The passing of SESTA and the seizure of Backpage sent shockwaves through the tech community,” McAdams’ lawsuit says. “Yet, despite the public outcry and condemnation of actions, MailChimp chose to go the other way and assist YesBackpage in its sex trafficking venture.” In a statement to BuzzFeed, MailChimp said that “we absolutely don’t allow content related to illegal activity on our platform.” While the lawsuit does not specify a monetary amount sought by the plaintiff, McAdams told BuzzFeed that she expected a jury to “send a message” to tech companies that she claims “have made millions off facilitating sex trafficking.” In one early test of Section 230 in the FOSTA/SESTA era, however, a federal court in New York ruled that the law protected the gay dating site Grindr against a lawsuit by a user who claimed he was victimized by a jilted boyfriend who used Grindr to create fake profiles, causing more than 1,000 men to make unwanted contact with him, even showing up at his home. But the Grindr lawsuit did not specifically cite FOSTA/SESTA as a basis for its claims. Photo By Dmitry Barsky / Wikimedia Commons