Twitter Sued for Refusing to Remove Child Pornography

Twitter has come under fire not only for aiding in the shutdown of the Social Networking site Parler and for allowing for the unvetted posting of content clearly promoting hatred & violence, but Twitter is now being sued for refusing to remove images of Child Pornography.  On January 20th, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation filed a lawsuit against Twitter (Link to Lawsuit).  In the lawsuit, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation accuses Twitter of violating their duty to report child sexual abuse material and of violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.  The lawsuit was filed by the victim and his mother, in which they allege that Twitter made money off clips showing the victim, who was 13 at the time, engaging in sexual activity.  The victim, who is now 17, stated that as a child, he had been blackmailed into performing these sexual activities.  Though he managed to escape from his blackmailers, the images resurfaced in 2019 on two accounts that were know to share child sexual abuse material.

The Video was retweeted over 2,000 times and viewed 167,000 times.  Though it was repeatedly reported to Twitter's Safety team, Twitter took no action to remove the video.  In July 2020, the victim became aware of the video and personally complained to Twitter's Trust and Safety team and pleaded that they be removed.  Twitter did not even respond for a week.  When the victim finally received a response, he was stunned that Twitter refused to remove the video, stating that the content did not violate their safety policies (Link to Article).  The stunned victim wrote back and pleaded for the content to be removed, even providing his case number from local law enforcement to prove that this was an active criminal matter.  Eventually, Federal Law Enforcement Officers from the Department of Homeland Security threatened to take action unless Twitter removed the video.  A this point, Twitter finally complied, taking down the video, suspending the account, and reporting the incident to the authorities.  However, it was the authorities themselves who had to push Twitter to take the appropriate action (Link to Article).  

To those who think that this is an isolated incident, think again.  On Jan. 11th, local media sources in Idaho reported that a man was arrested for sharing images of Child Pornography on his Twitter account (Link to Article).  Though the suspect states that he never sent the images and simply clicked on links that led the images to be downloaded into his account, police investigators revealed that they found several messages between the suspect and another Twitter account.  Among the back and forth messages were hundreds links two show images of child sexual abuse.  Even prior to these recent events, Twitter came under fire for their refusal to remove Child Pornography.  In 2012 an article published by The Guardian revealed that a photo of a little boy being raped was being retweeted on Twitter.  Numerous individuals reported the image of a boy being raped to Twitter's Safety team and demanded that the photo be taken down.  However, Twitter refused to do so.  It wasn't until journalists were made aware of the incident and began to publish this atrocity that Twitter finally removed the image and canceled the account of the one who originally posted it.  As the years progressed, many continued to report that Twitter was not doing a good job removing child pornography from their site (Link to Video).  

Twitter not only deserves to be sued for this, but those responsible for allowing this video to remain on the platform despite numerous complaints should be in prison.  Even more astoundingly, Twitter is hosted by Amazon Web Services, which de-platformed Parlor for "not moderating content," but won't de-platform Twitter for not removing child pornography unless they're directly threatened by journalists and law enforcement agencies.  Can we say "hypocrisy?"