Stackla/Facebook (courtesy photo)

One of Facebook's former business partners is suing the social media giant for its "scorched-earth approach" to managing the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which the company claims has left it struggling to survive.

Content-marketing company Stackla alleges that Facebook revoked the company's licenses granting access to its platforms to protect its own reputation, not for any legitimate violations of their agreement, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Thursday.

Stackla claims Facebook's moves have strangled its business model of using artificial intelligence to support brands with publicly available user-generated social media posts.

"Defendants recognize this virtually monopolistic power they exert over the social media landscape, and they use it to advance their own interests or deflect away from their own missteps—even if it means crushing good-faith actors like Stackla in the marketplace along the way," wrote DLA Piper's Jeffrey Tsai, Isabelle Ord, David Gross and Anthony Portelli in San Francisco. "If Defendants are allowed to exclude Stackla from Facebook and Instagram, Defendants will crush Stackla," they wrote.

Stackla received a cease and desist letter from Facebook in August following a Business Insider article that named the marketer among several other partners who had violated Instagram users' privacy by scraping data. The article reported that old statements on Stackla's website referenced collecting location data from Instagram. A week after the article went live, Facebook accused Stackla of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), as well as Facebook and Instagram's terms of use.

"Scraping violates our policies, and we have taken action against several companies engaged in this behavior, including Stackla," a Facebook representative said. "We're continuing to develop more proactive data scraping detection methods."

Stackla, however, denies these allegations and argues the company only extracts data via a Facebook program that allows third-party companies to access user content through an application programming interface (API). The company contends that getting the boot from Facebook's platforms was merely damage control for the social network's other privacy issues.

"Stackla is a good actor in the marketplace, but became a casualty of Defendants' relentless scorched-earth approach to belated reputation protection," wrote Stackla's DLA Piper attorneys. "In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and fueled by state and federal law enforcement antitrust investigations, a reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission investigation, and Congressional inquiries, Facebook and Instagram recently have begun purging their platforms of companies, at least as to Stackla, without any rhyme or reason and in violation of their good-faith partnerships and agreements."

The marketer, whose U.S. arm is based in San Francisco, claimed that its clients and investor relationships would die off without access to the platforms, and ultimately derail its plans to go public.

The company's lawyers also claimed that the cease and desist letter made "impossible demands to Stackla that are tantamount to asking Stackla to destroy its entire business." Besides no longer using the platforms, the letter asked the company to remove all references to Facebook and Instagram from its website and marketing materials, delete all data scraped from the sites and hand over the confidential and proprietary tools Stackla used to obtain data, including its software code.

Stackla is asking for a declaratory judgment stating it did not violate the CFAA or CDAFA through its partnership with Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook improperly wielded the laws against Stackla.

Stackla claims it has already started to feel the effects of the ousting. Current clients have already expressed their concerns and will terminate their contracts if the issue is not resolved, and prospective clients are now fleeing to competitors, according to the complaint.

"Stackla's competitors are aggressively prospecting Stackla's clients, claiming that Defendants' revocation of Stackla's access suggests that Stackla is a bad actor in the industry and the clients should switch to the competitor's offering," Stackla's lawyers write. "Stackla's is losing business every day that access to Facebook and Instagram is shut off, and this will soon reach a tipping point where Stackla can no longer operate."

Stackla's representatives from DLA Piper did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.