A federal lawsuit accuses Twitter of receiving, distributing, and profiting from child pornography that perverts and molesters shared with users after they blackmailed a teenager into producing it.
Filed on Wednesday in the Northern District of California, the 79-page lawsuit says perverts represented themselves on Snapchat as a 16-year-old girl and tricked a 13-year-old boy into sending nude photos of himself.
The perverts then threatened to expose the boy if he did not create sex videos. He did so, after which they had free reign to spread the material on Twitter, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit says the social media site refused to remove the material after the boy and his mother complained. Twitter falsely claimed the repellent material did not violate its rules, the lawsuit alleges, and did not remove it until a federal agent inquired about it.
Users retweeted the videos 2,200 times and viewed them 167,000 times.
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The Main Charges
Twitter benefitted from sex trafficking, violated its duty to report child sex-abuse material, and received and distributed child porn, the lawsuit alleges.
“Twitter has enabled and profited from CSAM [Child Sexual Abuse Material] on its platform, choosing profits over people, money over the safety of children, and wealth at the expense of human freedom and human dignity,” the lawsuit says:
Twitter is not a passive, inactive, intermediary in the distribution of this harmful material; rather, Twitter has adopted an active role in the dissemination and knowing promotion and distribution of this harmful material. Twitter’s own policies, practices, business model, and technology architecture encourage and profit from the distribution of sexual exploitation material.
The trouble for plaintiff John Doe began in 2017 when he was 13 or 14 and exchanged the photos on Snapchat. After the photo exchange, the blackmail began. The perverts “wanted more sexually graphic pictures and videos of John Doe, and recruited, enticed, threatened and solicited John Doe by telling him that if he did not provide this material the nude pictures of himself that he had already sent would be sent to his parents, coach, pastor, and others in his community.”
Doe provided photos and videos of himself, and videos of himself with another minor, which are CSAM and child porn.
Doe “resolved to break free from the control of the Traffickers and attempted to block them,” who then messaged him through another account to warn him that he had “made a big mistake.”
Last year, the lawsuit says, John Doe, then 16, learned that perverts had shared the videos on Twitter.
Twitter Punts
When Doe contacted the hate-Trump site last January 21 to demand that it remove the material, the site thanked him for “reaching out,” and asked for identification and other information, presumably to help confirm Doe’s identity and stop the perverts.
The boy contacted the site three times, the lawsuit alleges.
Next day, Doe’s mother, identified as Jane, contacted Twitter twice. A week later, she complained a third time: “You are allowing child pornography to be in your web site for over a week now,” she wrote.
Frighteningly, the lawsuit alleges, Twitter replied this way:
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.
If you believe there’s a potential copyright infringement, please start a new report.
John Doe was nonplussed: “What do you mean you don’t see a problem?” he began in another complaint dated January 28:
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.
Twitter, the lawsuit alleges, “ignored John Doe’s final plea.”
Only after Jane Doe contacted the feds did Twitter remove the child porn, purge the perverts, and report to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children.
Thus, the lawsuit includes these allegations:
- knowingly benefiting from a sex-trafficking venture;
- knowingly ignoring and not reporting child sex-abuse material;
- knowingly receiving and distributing child porn; and
- multiple counts of negligence.
Twitter’s so-called rules that prohibit such material appear verbatim in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit’s child-porn accusations aren’t Twitter’s only trouble with perverts of late. As The New American reported last week, a homosexual hate-Trump GOP operative was stalking young men on the site.
