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FILE PHOTO. \u00a9 Reuters \/ Stephen Lam<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
RT.com<\/p>\n
A new lawsuit has accused Twitter of turning a blind eye to child pornography on its platform, claiming that it snubbed repeat requests from an underage sex trafficking victim to remove explicit images obtained through blackmail.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0suit<\/a>, filed by the teenage victim and his mother in the Northern District of California on Wednesday, argues that Twitter refused to pull the sexually graphic videos on the grounds that they did not violate its policies, allowing them to rack up well over 150,000 views.<\/p>\n The plaintiff in the case \u2013 identified only as\u00a0\u201cJohn Doe\u201d<\/em>\u00a0in court records \u2013 says he was just 13 when he was manipulated into sharing nude images of himself with a Snapchat user he believed to be a 16-year-old classmate. After he did so,\u00a0\u201cthe correspondence changed to blackmail,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the lawsuit claims, adding that the perpetrators threatened to share the photos with the victim\u2019s\u00a0\u201cparents, coach, pastor, and others in his community\u201d<\/em>\u00a0if he did not send additional material. He complied with the traffickers\u2019 demands, sending sexually explicit videos of himself, some of which included another minor.<\/p>\n At some point in 2019, a\u00a0\u201ccompilation video\u201d<\/em>\u00a0featuring the footage extorted from John Doe surfaced on Twitter through at least two accounts, eventually making their way to the victim in January 2020 after\u00a0\u201che learned from his classmates that [the] videos of him and another minor were on Twitter and that many students in the school had viewed them.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n “Due to the circulation of these videos, he faced teasing, harassment, vicious bullying, and became suicidal.”<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Immediately, the victim \u2013 who by this time was 16-years-old \u2013 informed his parents of the situation, prompting his mother, named as\u00a0\u201cJane Doe\u201d<\/em>\u00a0in the suit, to take up the issue with school officials, local police and with Twitter directly. That followed at least one previous complaint from a concerned Twitter user in late 2019, who reported one of the accounts that shared footage of the victim. The company took no action and the videos remained live.<\/p>\n By January 21, the plaintiff filed his own complaint with Twitter, telling the platform\u00a0\u201cThese videos were taken from harassment and being threatened. It is now spreading around school and we need them taken down as we are both minors and we have a police report for the situation.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0At the request of Twitter, he provided a photo of his driver\u2019s license to confirm his identity.<\/p>\n Jane Doe also filed two additional complaints with the company one day later, to which Twitter replied with identical automated messages promising to review the content in question.<\/p>\n After a full week without a response from the company, despite repeat attempts by the victim\u2019s mother beyond her initial complaints, Twitter finally replied on January 28, stating that it found no problems with the sexually explicit videos and would do nothing to have them removed.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks for reaching out. We\u2019ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Twitter said, while insisting without a hint of irony that\u00a0\u201cyour safety is the most important thing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The victim replied on the same day, outraged over the platform\u2019s inaction, asking\u00a0\u201cWhat do you mean you don\u2019t see a problem?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While the company ignored John Doe\u2019s final plea, within a few days his family\u00a0\u201cwas able to connect with an agent of the US Department of Homeland Security\u201d<\/em>\u00a0through a mutual contact, according to the suit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe federal agent also initiated contact with Twitter and at the request of the US federal government, the [explicit content] was finally removed from Twitter on or about January 30, 2020,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the lawsuit continues, adding that the offending accounts were also banned.<\/p>\n Twitter has come under fire in the past for its handling of child pornography, with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection finding in a\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0last year that the platform makes it\u00a0\u201cextremely difficult\u201d<\/em>\u00a0to report such content, forcing users to locate a form separate from its\u00a0\u201ceasily-accessible report function\u201d<\/em>\u00a0found on every tweet.<\/p>\n As of March 2019, Twitter claims to enforce a\u00a0\u201czero-tolerance child sexual exploitation policy,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0and in its communications with John Doe and his mother said it forwards all reports of such material to the National Center Missing and Exploited Children. However, despite aggressive efforts by the victim to have images of himself removed from the platform, the company only did so after being contacted by the US federal government, failing to relay John Doe\u2019s case to the Center until that point.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s apparently lax stance on child pornography comes in stark contrast to its forceful policing of political content it deems\u00a0\u201chateful\u201d<\/em>\u00a0or to spread\u00a0\u201cmisinformation,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0regularly purging thousands of posts and users \u2013 among them even former president Donald Trump \u2013 over technical policy violations.<\/p>\n