Twitter faces claim it benefited from child sex trafficking
Two young men can proceed with a claim that Twitter Inc.
benefited from sex trafficking involving
them as teenagers when it published child pornography videos on its website,
but they can’t pursue other claims, a federal court in California ruled.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act’s
requirements for civil claims, including knowledge requirements, are less
strict than those for criminal charges brought under the Act, Chief Magistrate
Judge Joseph C. Spero said Thursday for the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of California, allowing the benefit claim.
The remainder of the claims fail, either because the plaintiffs
alleged them inadequately or because they’re blocked by the Communications
Decency Act, he said.
Their product liability claim is distinguishable from one that the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently allowed in a case against
app maker Snap Inc. over a “speed filter” that allegedly led to a fatal car
crash, Spero said. Unlike the speed filter, “the nature of the alleged design
flaw in this case—and the harm that is alleged to flow from that flaw—is
directly related to the posting of third-party content on Twitter,” he said.
The CDA bars the product liability claim, he said.
The plaintiffs, who are suing under the pseudonyms John Doe #1 and
John Doe #2, allege they were solicited at age 13 for sex trafficking and
manipulated into providing pornographic videos of themselves to the trafficker,
according to the court. Later, while they were in high school, links to the
videos allegedly appeared on Twitter.
Twitter allegedly
refused to remove the tweets when first informed of them. The posts were
allegedly viewed more than 167,000 times.
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