Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn? — SkimNews
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- Strike 3 Holdings, parent of adult-film producer Vixen Media Group, is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,973 of its copyrighted videos over BitTorrent; while gathering that evidence it also captured file logs showing Meta networks obtained Celebgate images, deepfake porn featuring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, and Gal Gadot, GirlsDoPorn archives, 19 files containing 3-D-printer handgun blueprints, and a list of 5,718,107 passwords hacked between 2015 and 2019.
- Judge Eumi Lee denied Meta's motion to dismiss, ruling that the company's "coincidence theory" for the downloads "strains belief" and that the patterns likely reflect "algorithmically coordinated behavior," allowing the case to proceed to discovery.
- Meta defended the downloads as "personal consumption" by employees, contractors, or office visitors, but Strike 3's file-transfer logs show sequences of unrelated items sharing only loose thematic keywords — such as a "Bajillion Dollar Properties" sitcom episode downloaded immediately before "First Time Home Buyer Anal Fantasy" — patterns Lee cited as undermining that explanation.
- Meta allegedly "seeded" some of Strike 3's videos to other BitTorrent users for up to three months after downloading them, meaning the company's networks redistributed infringing content even as it was being acquired.
- Former Meta engineer Jelmer van der Linde told a supervisor in a work chat that torrenting copyrighted books for AI training struck him as "a very very dark grey area. Legally, ethically…"; he was transferred off the project, another developer downloaded the books instead, and van der Linde has since left Meta for the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford.
- Nearly 300 of the alleged file transfers were traced to a Mountain View, California residence Strike 3 claims belongs to a Meta contractor's father; the downloads — which included Russian-language books, Chinese movies, and cracked software alongside porn — stopped when the contractor left Meta.
- Independent cybersecurity professor Tom Chothia of the University of Birmingham, reviewing Strike 3's BitTorrent data-collection methodology, told The Atlantic that if the records weren't tampered with, "they have established that people at Meta were uploading" Strike 3's videos — and separate lawsuits show OpenAI and Anthropic have also used BitTorrent to download copyrighted books for AI training.
- Meta's spokesperson called the claims "bogus" and labeled Strike 3 a "copyright troll," while arguing its terms of service already prohibit generating porn with its AI products — a point Judge Lee found irrelevant to whether Meta deliberately acquired the material.
Why it matters: A federal judge has already found Strike 3's pattern evidence credible enough to survive dismissal, meaning Meta now faces discovery over whether its networks systematically acquired not just porn but Celebgate imagery, celebrity deepfakes, 3-D gun blueprints, and hacked passwords — content far more sensitive than the copyrighted videos named in the original complaint. If Strike 3's data hold up in discovery, the allegations would show that participation in large-scale BitTorrent piracy is a routine by-product of AI-era tech development, and the article links the same BitTorrent-based acquisition method to separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Anthropic, suggesting this is an industry-wide data-collection pattern rather than a Meta-only outlier.
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