Facebook Exec, Former UK Deputy PM Clegg Accused of Taking Bribes from OnlyFans to Censor Competitors

Former Leader Of The Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg Speaks At A General Election Campaign Event
Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Former British deputy prime minister turned Facebook (now known as Meta) executive Sir Nick Clegg has been accused of accepting bribes from the adult website OnlyFans in court filings in San Francisco.

According to legal action brought forward by a group of adult entertainers, Sir Nick Clegg and two other executives at Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley tech giant have been accused of accepting bribes from the OnlyFans website to blacklist and censor the pornography site’s competitors.

Sir Nick, who serves as Facebook’s president of global affairs, vice president of global business team Nicola Mendelsohn, and European safety director Cristian Perrella were all supposed to have had their names blocked in the court fillings, but according to The Telegraph they were “inadvertently unredacted” by lawyers from the parent company of OnlyFans, Fenix International.

The suit alleges that the three executives at Meta, formerly Facebook, all received payoffs from the OnlyFans owner into trust fund accounts in the Philippines in exchange for using its censorship apparatus to blacklist the adult site’s competitors.

OnlyFans serves as a platform primarily for adult entertainers and influencers to share lewd photographs and videos of themselves with people who pay a monthly subscription fee. The individual users often use other social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, to promote their OnlyFans page. The suit claims that Facebook allowed OnlyFans users to do so while banning others on competitor sites from doing the same, allowing OnlyFans to prosper financially.

Denying the claims, a spokesman for Facebook said: “Plaintiffs haven’t identified a shred of evidence, and these allegations have been previously dismissed in federal court.”

They also complained that “[r]eporting out these claims that lack any evidence is irresponsible.”

The original filing from the plaintiffs was dismissed by a California judge, who said that the allegations were too vague, however, he allowed them to refile an amended suit.

In a motion to dismiss the suit, Facebook argued that the “plaintiffs still have no facts that plausibly support their story that OnlyFans paid Meta employees to place plaintiffs on internal terrorist lists.”

“The Court directed plaintiffs to come forward with ‘their best case’. Plaintiffs filed a second amended complaint, but it only confirms that plaintiffs’ best case is no case at all,” the tech giant insisted.

Fenix International has also filed a motion to dismiss the suit, calling the allegations “meritless”.

“The first amended complaint alleged a global conspiracy wherein the Fenix defendants – owners and operators of OnlyFans.com — allegedly conspired with individuals from Meta to ‘shadow ban’ tens of thousands of adult performers who were affiliated with websites that competed with OnlyFans.

“But the first amended complaint contained virtually no factual allegations to support this alleged conspiracy.”

Sir Nick is a former Liberal Democrat leader who previously served as deputy prime minister after forming a coalition government with Tory prime minister David Cameron in 2010. During his time in office his party saw a drastic fall in support, resulting in them winning just eight seats in the 2015 general election — which ultimately saw Sir Nick ousted as leader of the party.

After later losing his parliamentary seats and spending a few years trying to overturn the 2016 EU Referendum, he joined Facebook in 2018 as vice president of global affairs, saying that he did so to help the Silicon Valley company navigate “the balance between free speech and prohibited content”.

In one of his most controversial decisions, Sir Nick was reportedly “involved” in the move to censor the New York Post article exposing material from Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 presidential election in the United States. A poll conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics in August found that 79 per cent of the American public believe that “truthful” news coverage of the laptop scandal would have changed the outcome of the election.

Sir Nick has continued to play a vital role in Meta’s censorship apparatus, leading the response to the war in Ukraine, including the decisions to ban Russian state media outlets such as RT and Sputnik in the United Kingdom and European Union.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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