Child-safety advocates are blasting Twitter and lining up to support a lawsuit that alleges the social network declined to remove videos depicting the sexual exploitation of minors despite pleas from a victim and his family.
“It’s child sexual abuse material. He was 13 years old and being extorted. What the hell is Twitter doing?” asked Hany Farid, a professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
Farid, who has testified before Congress five times on issues of online safety and regulation, and others filed paperwork with a federal appellate court in San Francisco last week supporting the lawsuit
A respected nonprofit that works closely with the federal government to fight the sexual exploitation of children also supports the lawsuit because of Twitter’s alleged refusal to take down the videos despite the family’s pleas.
“The facts in this case are especially egregious because the electronic service provider was aware of the child victims’ graphic sexual images and refused to remove the videos from the platform,” the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told The Examiner in an email.
NCMEC will receive nearly $37 million in taxpayer funding this fiscal year to, in part, “provide online users and electronic service providers a means to report internet-related child sexual exploitation,” according to the Department of Justice.
The lawsuit alleges that two users discovered that sexual abuse videos taken of them a few years earlier were circulating on Twitter. The plaintiffs, who were 13 years old in the videos, say they were blackmailed into making the videos and that the posting of them led to bullying at school and extreme anxiety.
