Twitter Sued In Federal Court For Sex Trafficking, Court Decides Suit is Valid
"The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an organization that has campaigned against pornography and celebrated denying banking services to platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans, is coming for Twitter, one of the only social media platforms where adult entertainment performers can share their work without being banned.
NCOSE, formerly known as Morality in Media, brought a lawsuit against Twitter earlier this year, accusing the platform of allowing and benefiting from human trafficking. The complaint, on behalf of two men, alleges that Twitter "knowingly hosted sexual exploitation material, including child sex abuse material [...] and allowed human trafficking and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material to continue on its platform, therefore profiting and receiving value from the harmful and exploitive material and the traffic it draws."
With a court decision in mid-August, the case was allowed to move forward, " Vice reported.
Earlier this year, in January the NCOSE posted on their website:
Twitter, one of the most popular social media sites in the world with over 330 million users, has had a hand in the sexual exploitation of countless victims of abuse, coercion, and objectification on their platform. It is on behalf of one of these victims, John Doe, that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Law Center-along with The Haba Law Firm and The Matiasic Law Firm-has filed a federal lawsuit against Twitter for its complicity in sex trafficking by knowingly distributing and profiting from child sexual abuse material of Doe.
John Doe was 16 years old when he learned that sexually graphic videos of himself-which were made under the duress of fraud and coercion of an online predator when Doe was 13 and 14-years-old-had been posted to Twitter. John Doe's mother, Jane Doe, stepped in and contacted the authorities, the school, and Twitter. Using Twitter's reporting system, which according to their policies is supposedly designed to catch and stop illegal material like child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from being posted, they communicated and verified to Twitter that John Doe was a minor and the videos needed to be taken down immediately.
Instead of the videos being removed, Twitter chose to do nothing and even went so far as to report back to John Doe that the video in question did not violate any of their policies. This lack of care and proper attention resulted in the CSAM of John Doe accumulating over 167,000 views before direct involvement from a law enforcement officer finally convinced Twitter to remove the offending material.