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Twitter refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a teenage sex trafficking victim because an investigation “didn’t find a violation” of the company’s “policies.”
This is described in a federal lawsuit, filed on January 20th by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California.
According to the accusation, Twitter made money off the clips, which showed a 13-year-old engaged in sex acts and are a form of child sexual abuse material, or child porn.
The teen, now 17 and lives in Florida, used to live in California and is identified only as “John Doe.”
According to the lawsuit, sex traffickers, posing as a 16-year-old classmate began chatting to the victim online.
Doe and the traffickers allegedly exchanged nude photos before the conversation turned to blackmail: If the teen didn’t share more sexually graphic photos and videos, the explicit material he’d already sent would be shared with his “parents, coach, pastor” and others.
The victim first did what was asked from him, sent videos of himself performing sex acts and was also told to include another child in his videos, which he did.
Eventually, Doe blocked the traffickers and they stopped harassing him, but at some point in 2019, the videos surfaced on Twitter under two accounts that were known to share child sexual abuse material.
The videos were reported at least 3 times to Twitter, beginning on December 25th, 2019.
No actions were undertaken.
The victim became aware of the tweets in January 2020 because they’d been viewed widely by his classmates, which subjected him to “teasing, harassment, vicious bullying” and led him to become “suicidal.”
His parents contacted police and the school, and the victim himself filed a complaint with Twitter.
He said that there were two tweets depicting child pornography of himself and they needed to be removed because they were illegal, harmful and were in violation of the site’s policies.
A Twitter support agent asked for an ID card to prove who he is, which he did, but there was no response.
The mother also filed complaints against the tweets.
On January 28th, 2020, Twitter replied to Doe and said they wouldn’t be taking down the material, which had already racked up over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets, the suit states.
“Thanks for reaching out. We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time,” the response reads, according to the lawsuit.
“If you believe there’s a potential copyright infringement, please start a new report. If the content is hosted on a third-party website, you’ll need to contact that website’s support team to report it. Your safety is the most important thing, and if you believe you are in danger, we encourage you to contact your local authorities.”
The victim was shocked, according to the response:
“What do you mean you don’t see a problem? 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,” the teen wrote.
He even included a law enforcement agency’s case number.
On January 30th, the mother was contacted by an agent from US Department of Homeland Security, saying the videos had been taken down.
“Only after this take-down demand from a federal agent did Twitter suspend the user accounts that were distributing the CSAM and report the CSAM to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children,” states the suit, filed by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and two law firms.
“This is directly in contrast to what their automated reply message and User Agreement state they will do to protect children.”
Finally, media requested a comment from Twitter, which they declined, but then rethought their course and gave out a generic response via email:
“Twitter has zero-tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy,” a Twitter spokesperson wrote.
“Our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors and to ensure we’re doing everything we can to remove content, facilitate investigations, and protect minors from harm — both on and offline.”
As such, it should be reminded that former US President Donald Trump is banned on Twitter, permanently. Conservative voices and those who do not support US President Joe Biden are systematically banned.
That is the unwanted content for Twitter, as it appears to be entirely fine with leaving child pornography up to the point when federal agencies intervene.
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Child porn. Pedotwitter loves pedobide…
Hunter, to be exact.
Him too.
Conservatives bad… Pedos good…. Got it twitter… Western values in a nutshell…
Why I’m absolutely NOT surprised about that level of AmeriCunt Hypocrisy?
‘Silicon Valley Values’, to be more precise …
Californicators.
EXACTLY! They’re about to turn entire World to rotten California, aggressors of others who have different lifestyles.
The perverted fucked-up ‘Values’ of the corrupt/criminal Fascist neoliberal/globalist Elites/Oligarchs.
Silicon Valley and fully supported by many easy to blackmail and coerce, politicians.
Guy should have framed it as a copyright claim. Most of the Oligarchs are pedos themselves so of course they won’t see any problem with it but watch how they squirm when their copyright scam is threatened.
Tell me now the U.S. is not toast….
It’s called corporate fascim the enemy of the Commonwealth and peoples worldwide, sure there may be phoneys misrepresenting others flags,you will know them by their pro/cia/soros+
One day someone is going to take matters into their own hands. Twitter will not walk away from this. It’s only a matter of time now.
Looks like Jack needs something to jack him off too!
This article is trash. Southfront reports on either Russia or America and meanwhile China is a piece of dog crap with no coverage of their evil.. I thought Southfront covered military provocations but meanwhile today China authorizes their coast guard to fire on vessels from other nations within their joke of a ‘9 dashed line’ and SOUTH FRONT reports on TWITTER????!!!!! total joke
I gonna say this – who remember what Tumblr did? And how that went for them…Yes Tumblr did removed all porn-NSFW from their platform and they lost 30% of web traffic (2019).
“Tumblr’s global traffic in December clocked in at 521 million, but it had dropped to 370 million by February, web analytics firm SimilarWeb tells The Verge. Statista reports a similar trend in the number of unique visitors. By January 2019, only over 437 million visited Tumblr, compared to a high of 642 million visitors in July 2018”
I remember those fukers went to TWITTER…if you have been on internet for long time you would know that Twitter is the gate to NSFW and Porn – Onlyfans – Phub – CP – you name it. Twitter wouldn’t dare to do what Tumblr did few years ago. But it is have to be said that in almost all media platforms you can find people posting NSFW shit…not just Twitter – FB – YT – etc.