A child sex trafficking victim has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in California against Twitter, alleging that the social media giant knowingly received and distributed child pornography and profited from it.
According to court documents, John Doe said he was recruited for sex trafficking when he was a minor. After he escaped, material describing his sexual abuse was distributed on Twitter.
The plaintiff in the case said, “When Twitter was informed of this fact and John Doe’s age, Twitter refused to remove the illegal material and instead continued to spread it and profit from this sexual abuse of children.”
John Doe and his Parents contacted Twitter several times about the content, but Twitter, for its part, allegedly stopped posting the material until a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent intervened on the account.
The plaintiffs in the case allege that Twitter violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, numerous criminal laws against sexual exploitation and other child abuse, and multiple charges of negligence.
On Jan. 8, Twitter permanently deleted the account of former President Donald Trump (Trump). Two days earlier, Trump was more than 30 minutes away from speaking to a large crowd of supporters when a mob broke into Congress, according to a timeline by the Epoch Times. Twitter later suspended Trump’s account, saying his recent posts “violate the company’s policy on the glorification of violent content.”
Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, sued Twitter Inc. and several Twitter accounts in 2019 for “negligence, defamation, insulting statements and civil conspiracy.” But a judge ruled that Twitter is immune from liability for content on its site because it is not a content provider and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants the private company immunity from defamation and negligence claims.
The uneven regulation of user-posted content raises concerns that large technology companies lack checks and balances in deciding what content to remove. Over the past year, Trump has led a lively debate about limiting or eliminating the immunity from damages that Section 230 provides to technology companies that engage in censorship or politically biased behavior.
John Doe’s brief states, “Twitter is not a passive, inactive intermediary in the dissemination of this harmful material; rather, Twitter has played an active role in disseminating, and pushing, this harmful material.” “Twitter’s own policies, measures, business model, and technological architecture encouraged this and profited from the distribution of sexually offensive content.”
The lawsuit further states, “With 330 million users, Twitter is one of the world’s largest social media companies. It is also one of the largest purveyors of material depicting and disseminating child sexual abuse and exploitation.”
The suit states that it “seeks to reveal how Twitter has allowed and profited from the distribution of child sexual abuse material on its platform, choosing profit over people, money over the safety of children, and acquiring wealth at the expense of human freedom and human dignity.”
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