Plaintiff Contends Cognizant's Motion to Dismiss Should Be Denied in Its Entirety

Plaintiff Zuania Vazquez-Padilla remedied the court’s concern that plaintiffs in a multi-plaintiff action against Cognizant Technology relied on group allegations to support their individual claims of fraud, said her memorandum of law Monday (docket 8:23-cv-02607) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Tampa in support of her opposition to Cognizant's motion to dismiss. Vazquez-Padilla’s November complaint alleged Cognizant’s human content moderation system, which provided content moderation services to Facebook, established call centers in “relatively low-paying labor markets” such as suburban Tampa to hire “low-paid, unsophisticated workers with little knowledge of the technology industry to perform the grueling job of content moderation.” Vazquez-Padilla’s lawsuit arises out of the Aguilo v. Cognizant class action (docket 8:21-cv-002054), which the court dismissed without prejudice “chiefly, because Plaintiffs continue to rely on group allegations to support their individual claims of fraud,” said the memorandum. In the multi-plaintiff action, the court determined that Vazquez-Padilla was the only plaintiff to have pleaded with sufficient particularity as to when the fraudulent misrepresentation occurred, it said. Vazquez-Padilla said she received a “cheat sheet” June 28, 2018, from a recruiter who hired content moderators for Cognizant. She also satisfied the “when” and “where” of the initial misrepresentation, saying she arrived for her assessment at Cognizant’s Tampa facility July 6, 2018. In its motion to dismiss, Cognizant said Vazquez-Padilla’s reliance on its misrepresentations about the dangers of content moderation wasn’t justified because whether something is harmful is “inherently subjective." But “nothing could be further from the truth,” said the memorandum, saying Facebook was aware of the dangers of long-term unmitigated content moderation and helped draft workplace safety standards to protect moderators. Vazquez-Padilla has been diagnosed with post-traumatic, acute and anxiety disorders, plus insomnia and other conditions resulting from Cognizant’s “tortious conduct,” said the memorandum. She alleges the injuries affect her daily life in that she and her children don’t go out often as a result of exposure to graphic content. In two related actions, a judge and an arbitrator denied Cognizant’s motions to dismiss, finding plaintiff Dawnmarie Armato sufficiently pleaded with specificity Cognizant’s alleged misrepresentation of “known danger,” and plaintiff Daniel Walker’s knowledge of the dangers of Cognizant’s content moderation system was a question of fact precluding resolution at that stage of arbitration, it said. Cognizant’s motion to dismiss should be denied in its entirety, the memorandum said.