A US federal lawsuit alleges that Twitter refused to remove explicit videos of an underaged sex trafficking victim because it “didn’t find a violation” of the social media platform’s policies.
According to the New York Post, the lawsuit also alleges that Twitter made money from the posts.
The suit was filed by a teenage victim and his mother in the Northern District of California on Wednesday, the Post Millennial reports.
The victim, 17, alleges he was groomed and blackmailed on Snapchat by sex traffickers pretending to be a younger female classmate. The minor’s name is being withheld.
The victim alleges that the traffickers convinced the minor to exchange nude photos but threatened to share them with his “parents, coach, pastor” unless he sent more.
The traffickers allegedly told him to record sex acts with another child under threat of releasing the images, to which the victim complied. After the victim blocked the predators, the videos surfaced online in 2019.
According to the suit, the explicit videos were reported to Twitter at least three times over one month.
The victim made one complaint, while his mother made two complaints to Twitter. A support agent responded to the victim a week later and said no action would be taken.
At this time, videos depicting minors performing sex acts had been viewed over 167,000 times and retweeted about 2,223 times, according the lawsuit.
“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,” Twitter Support told the victim, the suit alleges.
The videos were not removed until the victim’s mother connected with a Department of Homeland Security agent.
The suit accuses Twitter of knowingly profiting from the content platform by advertising between the tweets.
A Twitter spokesperson told the New York post their teams “work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors.”
“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,” the spokesperson said.
On Thursday, a second “Twitter files” exposé on Thursday revealed the social media company blacklisted a Stanford medical expert who criticized Covid restrictions.
