Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-refusing-to-remove-child-porn/

180 202 6 years ago

The victim actually took steps to have content removed and Twitter failed to do so (initially). I wonder if payment vendors will give Twitter the "Pornhub treatment" and de-platform their access to financial services.

Finally on Jan. 28, Twitter replied to Doe and said they wouldn’t be taking down the material, which had already racked up over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets, the suit states.
“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,” the response reads, according to the lawsuit.

fakedang4• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, mainstream media won't pick on it, nor will the story gain traction because it is published in the NY Post. (if it is true)

Edit:- to the folks down voting me, please show me some major outlets (NYT, BBC, etc) reporting on this. As far as we are concerned, this kind of stuff should be news.

isochronous6• 6 years ago

There's more than one explanation as to why "mainstream media" might not run a story. The NY Post isn't exactly known as a bastion of credible journalism. That's why they ran the Hunter Biden laptop story when everyone else passed because they couldn't verify it.

shakna• 6 years ago

Edit:- to the folks down voting me, please show me some major outlets (NYT, BBC, etc) reporting on this. As far as we are concerned, this kind of stuff should be news.

The story is only a few hours old. "Mainstream" media often requires a level of verification that may take a few more days before you see their stories happen.

splaytreemap• 6 years ago

The mainstream media won't pick this up because they like Twitter. If Facebook had done this, WaPo and CNN would be all over it.

Bud3• 6 years ago

Real media don't make decisions on whether to publish based on whether something also appears in the NY Post. That's a ludicrous assertion.

What's actually happening: Murdoch rags like the Post have zero editorial standards, whereas others are attempting to actually vet this story before running it.

d1zzy• 6 years ago

I hope this doesn't result in Twitter banning all adult content which seems to be how all platforms handle pedophilia lawsuits/legal pressure these days.

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

The whole deplatforming thing is mostly virtue-signalling.

PornHub is an easy target and the people & companies involved in its deplatforming do not need it in any way (at least not in a way they would publicly admit - I'm sure some of them do consume its content) so it's an easy call to make and can gather significant support from certain conservative and religious circles.

Twitter on the other hand is near-essential to most brands and media outlets, so the virtue-signalling benefit from deplatforming it is minuscule compared to the loss (the people most vocal in support of PornHub's deplatforming would be the first ones out of a job), not to mention that virtue-signalling only works if you have a place to brag about your action - if you deplatform Twitter, where are you going to brag about it?

trianglem2• 6 years ago

Is virtue signaling being a good person through your actions?

supercanuck• 6 years ago

This all sounds reasonable to me. Seems like the victim's first recourse should be through the Law not Twitter.

but the tech giant failed to do anything about it until a federal law enforcement officer got involved, the suit states.
A support agent followed up and asked for a copy of Doe’s ID so they could prove it was him and after the teen complied, there was no response for a week, the family claims.
Only after this take-down demand from a federal agent did Twitter suspend the user accounts that were distributing the CSAM and report the CSAM to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children,” states the suit, filed by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and two law firms.

EDIT: Here is the timeline as far as I can tell.

Dec 25, 2019: John Doe Becomes aware of Content on Twitter

january 2020: John Doe and Fam: Report Content for Breaking Twitter Policies.

January 28,2020: Twitter doesn't think the content breaks its policies

January 30, 2020: Law Enforcement contacts Twitter to Remove the Content. Content is removed.

jlkuester73• 6 years ago

I am confused. What part of "We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time" seems reasonable? Personally this kind of content moderation seems to be the most important and it is absurd that Twitter should wait to remove this content until they are contacted by law enforcement.

Certainly the best thing might have been a "both/and" approach where the victim contacts both Twitter and law enforcement without waiting to hear back from either. But, contacting Twitter directly should be the fasted way to get cp removed from their platform....

jjk1662• 6 years ago

The full response is:

"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. If the content is hosted on a third-party website, you’ll need to contact that website’s support team to report it. Your safety is the most important thing, and if you believe you are in danger, we encourage you to contact your local authorities."

Pretty clearly an automated response.

violetgarden• 6 years ago

If it was me, I’d have probably gone straight to Twitter too. My thought would be that they’re hosting the content, so they’d probably be able to get it removed the fastest. It also wouldn’t occur to me that an agent wouldn’t find CP to violate their terms. I’m surprised that Twitter didn’t take it down as a CYA precaution while they verified it to be CP or not.

jlkuester73• 6 years ago

During all the recent debates regarding Parler, much was said about how Parler needed effective moderation like Twitter. This article is an important reminder that there is a lot more room for improvement in the moderation space and even companies that "do it right" are still making glaring mistakes.

We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time

This is totally unacceptable. I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability that could apply here? Taken at face value, this message seems to indicate that a Twitter representative reviewed content and chose to not remove it which sounds a lot to me like knowingly and willfully distributing cp....

(edited to fix spelling of "Parler")

na85• 6 years ago

This is totally unacceptable.

And yet not at all surprising. These huge companies have a reputation for being faceless because they skimp on staffing their support teams and until the so-called "tech reckoning" have operated with virtual impunity.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

This article is an important reminder

The only facts being reported in this article is that someone made claims in a lawsuit.

This is totally unacceptable. I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability that could apply here?

Yes. Both civil liability (under the fairly recent exceptions relating sex trafficking to 230 protection) and criminal liability (section 230 has never applied to criminal liability) are possible, for the kinds of things claimed in the lawsuit.

That civil liability is possible is, of course, almost certainly a factor in why the lawsuit was filed; while you can file a lawsuit where there is no available liability, it tends to be a waste of effort.

Of course, one would also do well to take claims made in a lawsuit with some skepticism. If those didn't often turn out to be untrue, we wouldn't need courts nearly as much as we do.

toss1• 6 years ago

Exactly, aside from the civil liability already being pursued in the reported lawsuit, there should also be criminal liability for people making those editorial judgements, as far up the management chain as it goes.

This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute.

At that point, they are willfully distributing the material, and should be held accountable.

Yes, the result may be harsh. Ideally, there would be advance notice of the potential legal jeopardy, but ignorance of the law is never an excuse, and child porn distribution is widely known to be illegal. Standard pull in the workers and get them to flip on the managers, repeat all the way up the chain as far as it goes.

It should now be obvious to anyone that internet discussions are either moderated/edited, or will descend into toxic cesspools when any of a variety of bad actors are allowed to run unchecked.

The hosts need to be responsible for their editing decisions, which are made at far larger scale than any newspaper or broadcaster.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute.

Or, you know, the claims in the lawsuit are false.

This wouldn't be the first time that happened.

RandallBrown• 6 years ago

I think you're talking about Parler, not Parlor which is a very different app.

jlkuester73• 6 years ago

Shoot, you are right. Fixed!

BryanBeshore• 6 years ago

Here’s the lawsuit brought by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation:

https://www.scribd.com/document/491614044/Doe-v-Twitter

Hello71• 6 years ago

It's worth noting that the NCSE (formerly known as Morality in Media) is completely against pornography of any type.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 6 years ago

Maybe it's the headline that is misleading you, or it's a symptom of our times.

In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor. The insinuation that it's Twitter policy to distribute child pornography is laughable. They have absolutely nothing to gain from it.

As to liability: Section 230 is about exactly that situation: trying to limit damaging material on your platform does not create any liability even if you fail. Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable.

kenjackson3• 6 years ago

The article is from the NY Post. This makes me question it right out the gate. And I just find it hard to believe that Twitter would want to keep something like this up, since it is illegal content. There is no incentive for them to do so, and the NY Post isn't the publication to dive into this at all.

throwaway8943455• 6 years ago

Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable.

The current model isn't workable either. Social media networks and their ad-driven models have hollowed out our democracies by sowing outrage and division at every opportunity. If one believes "The Social Dilemma", these networks have a dial for tuning public opinion that can even steer election outcomes (if you subscribe to the "Russia used bots to hack the 2016 election" theory, then you must agree).

Maybe we should rethink the role of social media networks. Perhaps they monopolize too much communication to trust them to curate which voices are amplified and which are suppressed. The discourse around this issue has been really strange, with the usual critics of corporate power rallying to defend social media giants and their rights and qualifications to curate such an enormous portion of our collective speech. Perhaps we should consider these networks to be more "dumb pipes" rather than "curators", and instead we should expect these networks to provide us with our own curation/moderation mechanisms. If there really is no workable social media model--that is, if they really can't deliver some net-positive social good (or at least some smaller net harm, like sex work, drugs/alcohol, tobacco, etc), then maybe we should regulate them out of existence?

edbob3• 6 years ago

In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor.

The lawsuit alleges precisely that Twitter had ample evidence to know that he was a minor. How about we let the case play out instead of assuming innocence?

thereare5lights• 6 years ago

it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor.

They were given government id. This point is invalid.

stretchcat12• 6 years ago

In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor

Or the moderator was [pick as many as you like]: Lazy, overworked, incompetent, or a scumbag.

jdxcode• 6 years ago

230 does not protect against criminal liability: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

IG_Semmelweiss• 6 years ago

I respectfully disagree.

I can place a contrarian, a nitpicker, a bully, even an algo, as twitter's manager of content. Twitter Users submit CP complaints. Then 99.99% responses are:

"After careful review of the content, we have not found this material violets twitter policy of no CP on our sites"

Truth is the eye of the beholder.

Thus, if the beholder is responsible for the decision and it is wrong, should they not be held accountable in the court of law? Even if it means lots of lawsuits?

tiagod• 6 years ago

I've had this happen to me on Facebook. Found a disgusting video involving children, reported it, got a response that there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the people reviewing this stuff have only a second to decide if the content should be deleted.

devwastaken• 6 years ago

If a person sees it at all. Twitter and Facebook are far too large to moderate effectively with humans. Most things are caught by automated image recognition, but that doesn't work for images not yet in the database.

newsbinator• 6 years ago

After 3 or 4 of these rejections I stopped reporting.

gamblor9562• 6 years ago

OTOH, I've reported posts and had them take them down within the hour...

The issue seems to be that some posts are reviewed by Facebook staff in America, and others by Facebook staff in India. The American staff acts quickly and is very good about taking violations down. The Indian staff seems to be very laissez faire, due to the different cultural standards for content.

kenbolton• 6 years ago

Are you notified of the location of the reviewer?

matz1• 6 years ago

Thats understandable, what you considered disgusting may not be conisdered disgusting by other people.

captainredbeard• 6 years ago

Well, those people with a different (lesser) definition of disgusting w.r.t. children are called pedophiles and they are bad.

jamesponddotco• 6 years ago

And yet, in the ancient times when I had a Facebook and Instagram profile for my photography hobby[1], I would wake up every day to new removed images for showing "too much skin."

[1] Nude art photography, with private parts covered with white stripes or simply not being shown at all.

thamer• 6 years ago

I'm sure a lot gets caught, but the amount that slips through is just unacceptable. Fortunately I haven't come across the kind of content you describe, but I reported ISIS propaganda on Twitter and was told it didn't break the rules. Shortly after complaining publicly and tagging @jack the tweet was removed. Could be a coincidence, I'll never know.

digianarchist• 6 years ago

Same on reddit.

d33lio• 6 years ago

Even as someone who's glad Biden is now president - it's a bit unnerving to be living in a time where a service bans the sitting united states president without batting an eye but engages in legal battles to defend the distribution of child pornography on their "open platform".

I guess people posting spicy takes on government happens to be more of an active risk to society than literal child predators?

ketamine__4• 6 years ago

People are banned from HN all the time for being rude. Does the reason even matter though? Twitter can decide who uses its services and who doesn't as long as it doesn't violate existing laws.

rosmax_13372• 6 years ago

You shouldn't compare a small and niche community like HN to a website like Twitter.

Twitter is the web equivalent of a public square, where everyone gets an opportunity at a speakers corner, HN is the web equivalent of a club house, or something private like that. There are laws governing public spaces all around the world, like town squares, where people are guaranteed rights to speak. Laws like these need to be adapted to fit the internet as well, asap IMO.

As much as you might like to think that the Town square analogy is incorret, because the protocol HTTPS is the real Town square, and Twitter is really just another club house. (except very big) I also disagree with that, because of the nature of social media and platform monopoly. There will ever really only be one "youtube", one "facebook" and one "twitter", certainly nowadays when these social media platforms have grown to such an extent, covering the entire globe, let alone nations! This is because _the power of a social media platform lies in it being social_ i.e., the place where you find other people.

The platforms on top, stay on top.

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

I don't really think that's a fair description of the story here. Twitter hasn't yet engaged in any legal battle; this lawsuit was filed just yesterday and they haven't responded.

jeffbee2• 6 years ago

They didn't ban Trump "without batting an eye" they dickered about it for four entire years while he trampled all over their AUP and they didn't bother banning him until he literally tried to incite a civil war, and even then it's clear that the only reason they banned him is that it didn't work. If somehow Trump's ridiculous little revolt had succeeded in installing him as president again, Twitter would have kept him too.

anonAndOn• 6 years ago

Different take: they only banned him because he was headed out the door. Had Trump been re-elected, we likely would've seen 4 more years of dithering so as not to piss off a man who could make their lives very stressful.

mansion72• 6 years ago

Did you read the tweets they used as justification?

A man simply saying "I'm not going to this event" allows them to suddenly become mind-readers and clairvoyants, able to not only read one's mind to determine what they REALLY meant, but also how others in the future will interpret it. Even Nostradamus didn't possess such foresight.

Yet actual, obvious child sexual exploitation is seemingly a low priority for them.

It's just interesting, their priorities. But not exactly a mystery.

rendall4• 6 years ago

It's a story that's so completely outside of my personal experience that I cannot evaluate it

In 14 years of holding a Twitter account, I've never seen anything even close to such things on Twitter, and wouldn't use the platform if I did. If I were to see child pornography on Twitter, I would immediately report it to law enforcement and close my account

Well, I hope that poor child wins justice.

marcinzm• 6 years ago

Welcome to the filter bubble. What you see on twitter, facebook, google, youtube, etc. is going to be radically different than what someone else sees.

rendall4• 6 years ago

Indeed. Knowing this is why I don't immediately doubt the story, despite its being outside my experience

throw_m2393394• 6 years ago

Start reading a single (non porn related) message from one these creeps and your Twitter timeline will be inundated with illegal porn content in no time. Twitter is absolutely rife with that horrible stuff, and Twitter certainly does the minimum to remove any of that, as demonstrated by that article.

Why even give the benefit of the doubt? Someone reports CP, remove it, period. Of course, Twitter makes money off it...

People claim Twitter can't possibly moderate content at scale, except that Twitter makes money at that same scale. Social media can't have it both way, especially when it comes to CP.

isochronous6• 6 years ago

"People claim Twitter can't possibly moderate content at scale, except that Twitter makes money at that same scale."

I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be a logical argument? Because it doesn't actually make any sense. Twitter is a platform that allows pretty much anyone with an internet connection to post content. There were, on average, 500 million tweets posted per day last year.

So on one side you have the set of potential content creators, churning out half a billion tweets per day, and that number will almost certainly continue to steadily increase. So, as a company with a set amount of income, and who is beholden to its shareholders, what's your plan to moderate 500 million tweets per day while still turning a reasonable profit?

icebraining7• 6 years ago

Why even give the benefit of the doubt? Someone reports CP, remove it, period. Of course, Twitter makes money off it...

Because it may not be CP, but a malicious reporter bullying the poster.

fernandotakai2• 6 years ago

i've been on twitter for the same time and last year was the first time i saw people talking about "map" which apparently means "minor attracted person"[0].

while searching around i found that there's a LOT of twitter accounts basically spewing pedophilia-related/adjacent stuff. i reported every single one of them and... nothing was done. not a single one was removed.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor-attracted_person

baby• 6 years ago

Write an article about it

rendall4• 6 years ago

I have seen these MAP people, but I don't consider that child pornography

The lawsuit in the article asserts that Twitter refused to remove an video of two extorted 13 year olds being sexual together. That seems unambiguously child pornography

eznzt• 6 years ago

That's normal, you only find those things if you look for them. There are lots of profiles with hundreds of thousands of followers full of porn, or football, or welding memes. But you never see them. Yet, there they are.

newbie578• 6 years ago

Now then, I expect a swift retribution from other companies to do the "right" thing and banish Twitter from our reach.

Remove them from Google searches, de-platform them from the App Store and cut their access to hosting services.

They have failed to moderate their platform, in fact in this case it seems they did on the contrary, so it is only just they get their part of punishment.

isochronous6• 6 years ago

Truly a disingenuous argument.

Parler didn't get TOS'd because they had things fall through their moderation process; they got TOS'd because they did not have a workable moderation process in place, period. Twitter obviously does make mistakes - both AIs and humans are fallible - but they have about as good a moderation process in place as it's possible to have with the amount of message traffic they process.

Also, I'd like to point out that the only evidence WE'VE seen of this so far are a few claims made in a lawsuit.

Sohcahtoa82• 6 years ago

The lack of moderation on Parler was considered a feature.

Except it actually did have moderation, but it was leftists voices that were silenced.

phkahler• 6 years ago

This is critical to Twitter's crappy stance. They want to act like a neutral party to avoid liability (like common carrier status of US telco), yet they also want to censor what and who they feel like (via their ToS and being a private company). Their stance is inconsistent and this type of case may lead to resolution of that. Unfortunately I predict they will just add a few illegal things to their ToS as being twitter offenses.

icebraining7• 6 years ago

This is not true, they have no liability even if they don't act (or pretend to act) neutrally.

And this case doesn't really have anything to do with their ToS, they removal of CP is required by law.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

You can literally claim anything in a lawsuit. Let's wait for some evidence or a judgement or a reply?

1_2__4• 6 years ago

I guess in 2021, HNers think the NY Post is a legitimate media outlet straining for objectivity, rather than the tabloid rag that they are. And I guess we'll all have a highly partisan discussion over it despite the Post obviously having a huge axe to grind against Twitter, further calling into question their "reporting".

lawnchair_larry2• 6 years ago

So you’re saying that NY Post fabricated the lawsuit that has been filed in court? Having an axe to grind doesn’t turn a fact into a falsehood.

bigphishy• 6 years ago

Wow, I don't mean to issue an ad-hominem attack... but I do not consider anything from NY Post legitimate, I'd even venture to say NY Post is a tabloid owned by News Corporation, and surprised that this is on HackerNews.

1_player• 6 years ago

Sadly, as more people flock to this site, it's becoming less Hacker News and more like Google News.

That seems to be the vast majority of stories submitted by OP, and the clickbait and inflammatory titles tend to rise to the front page.

prasadjoglekar• 6 years ago

The NY Post has a well known conservative bias, but that doesn't make their reporting illegitimate. You can disagree with their opinion pieces, but the factual reporting (in this case - that there's a lawsuit against Twitter) can be objectively checked.

Also as NYC'er, my take is that a lot of their opinions are quite accurate and correct.

j_walter• 6 years ago

Saying you don't consider ANYTHING from the NY Post to be legitimate is admitting you have personal bias against a news site because they lean one way politically. Why not read the story, see the evidence and decided yourself? If you go to some place like Twitter that you find credible, then you won't ever see this story.

A lot of people are talking about the Hunter Biden laptop story giving them a bad rep, but we now know that he is in fact under investigation for Tax Evasion and it could be in part to emails found on that computer (at least the ones that were published talked about income from sources that were likely not reported). Not saying the case is tied to that laptop since we don't know, but it could be.

tzs• 6 years ago

A better submission would have been to the Business Insider story on this that BI published yesterday [1]. BI has a much better reputation than the NY Post, and BI had the story a day before NY Post.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/minor-lawsuit-twitter-explic...

Gunax• 6 years ago

Folks, let's assume that the Twitter mod saw this and did not classify it as child porn. How can a twitter mod decide if it's child porn (as opposed to just 'porn')?

I am not sure there is a proper solution for this. How can they verify the age of an unknown person?

dx87• 6 years ago

They could just remove it if they can't tell, same way a bouncer will throw you out of a bar if you don't have ID.

I don't know why people are giving social media companies a pass on what goes on just because their job is hard. Nobody is holding a gun to their head and telling them that they need to run an unmanageable platform, they wanted this many users.

kenjackson3• 6 years ago

Maybe they do remove it if they can't tell. We don't know. Maybe they contacted the source of the video and they confirmed the age of the actors. Then what?

I didn't even know that Twitter had porn at all. It seems like it might be in their best interest to remove it altogether. There are sites that specialize in it, that I'd have to imagine are better sources for most people.

kingo55• 6 years ago

And consider the volume of false claims Twitter receives each day.

If everyone reported tweets that were CSAM just to take down a random post they disagree with, I'm sure moderators would make the occasional false negative.

35fbe7d3d5b92• 6 years ago

This is noted in the lawsuit: the CSAM reporting functionality isn't available in app, but requires navigating to a separate webpage.

The lawsuit claims that shows negligence on the part of Twitter for how they handle these reports, but I wonder if this shows Twitter takes it seriously: brigading and mass reporting happens constantly on the internet, so pushing that reporting functionality off the application increases the friction of false reporting something especially sensitive.

jes• 6 years ago

We need effective regulation of these platforms.

The regulation must be forward-looking. Trying to respond after a social media company has harmed the public, say by hosting illegal content, is not good enough. Social media companies cannot be allowed to say "Oh, sorry Congress, we made a mistake. We have now fixed it and it won't happen again."

It might be that we need an agency like the FCC to regulate the internal operations of these companies and bring about true shared decision making.

Attempts to exclude regulatory authorities from meetings should result in criminal charges and prison time for repeat offenders.

phnofive• 6 years ago

The lawsuit digs into the details of the timeline - from initial report by the plaintiff to removal of the content took nine days (with the help of law enforcement) - which makes me wonder how much merit there is to the suit, Twitter’s fumble notwithstanding.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

I've noticed that Twitter is very arbitrary in terms of what they moderate and don't moderate. I've seen accounts for antifa groups or other groups engaged in criminality and violence several times, and no action has been taken on my reports. Invariably, the reports that aren't acted upon are ones involving groups that align with left-leaning political sentiments. This type of selective enforcement of rules is extremely unjust, and I am not at all surprised to see this inconsistent enforcement in this instance either.

35fbe7d3d5b92• 6 years ago

Funny, a common refrain of those very accounts is "Twitter overmoderates left wing accounts and does nothing with right wing hate speech".

I think this doesn't point to Twitter being arbitrary; instead, I think it points to Twitter doing absolutely nothing until its hand is forced.

javajosh3• 6 years ago

I remember a story about someone getting arrested for "child porn" going through an airport when some TSA agent found a video of a mans kids taking a bath on his phone. I'm not sure what happened in that case, but it has made me a) hesitant to take similar video and photos of my kids (even though bathtime is really fun and I want memories! My parents have plenty of bathtime pics of me as a kid, and I'm glad!), and b) a lot more skeptical whenever I hear someone claim "child porn". Similar to how "registered sex offender" has lost a great deal of weight since apparently cities around the country apply this label to drunk people pissing on buildings.

This doesn't invalidate ALL such labels, it only means that the label itself is NOT ENOUGH for me to assume I know what happened. In short, "the system" has lost its credibility with me. (The same applies to other labels like "convicted felon" or "ever arrested". The ease with which these labels are applied, especially as the result of a corrupt plea bargain culture, and a society where all LEOs have a "marshal law bubble" around them, ruin the effect for me. And I wish it ruined the effect for more people.)

colpabar• 6 years ago

It seems pretty clear you did not read the article, so here

The federal suit, filed Wednesday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California, alleges Twitter made money off the clips, which showed a 13-year-old engaged in sex acts and are a form of child sexual abuse material, or child porn, the suit states.

The teen — who is now 17 and lives in Florida — is identified only as John Doe and was between 13 and 14 years old when sex traffickers, posing as a 16-year-old female classmate, started chatting with him on Snapchat, the suit alleges.

Doe and the traffickers allegedly exchanged nude photos before the conversation turned to blackmail: If the teen didn’t share more sexually graphic photos and videos, the explicit material he’d already sent would be shared with his “parents, coach, pastor” and others, the suit states.

Doe, acting under duress, initially complied and sent videos of himself performing sex acts and was also told to include another child in his videos, which he did, the suit claims.

Eventually, Doe blocked the traffickers and they stopped harassing him, but at some point in 2019, the videos surfaced on Twitter under two accounts that were known to share child sexual abuse material, court papers allege.

javajosh3• 6 years ago

Yes, it sounds like he was forced to make actual child porn...because he shared nudes. And THAT was so unacceptable to society that he felt forced to pay the blackmail.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the other stuff I hear about, like teenagers getting charged with child porn for sending dick picks, or rape charges because 2 16-year olds had (consenting) sex.

All of this is insane, and if not for the systemic insanity around sex in America, this kid would not have been coercable.

throwawayosiu12• 6 years ago

ah, maybe it's time we deplatform Twitter no?

maybe it's tongue in cheek but in all honesty, I find it extremely hypocritical that the Ayatollah of Iran, dis-information news organizations (esp those based in China) and now CP are fine on Twitter but god forbid some people on the right wing use the "#notmypresident" or "#learntocode" hashtags - both of which were extensively used by the left in 2016 without any repercussions what so ever.

I don't mind Twitter having it's policies (Infact I support it)- but selective enforcement of said policies is the issue.

fabbari• 6 years ago

I just checked: there are thousands of tweets with the #notmypresident hashtag. Not sure why you're not seeing them. Care to elaborate?

throwawayosiu12• 6 years ago

Weird, While I currently see none, I do see them logged out though.

Thanks for the heads-up. Looks like I might not be seeing the full picture logged in.

DanBC• 6 years ago

I have to say, I don't quite understand why services find it so difficult to remove this material. This has been a long standing problem with Twitter. They've improved a bit, but there's still problems.

Young people approach these platforms and say "here are some images of child sexual abuse that you're hosting. I know they're CSE because I'm the subject of the photos and I was <18 at the time". The platforms sometimes ignore them. Children are then stuck, not knowing how to get this "child porn"[1] taken down.

We need to help young people understand what routes are then available to them.

1) Write to the legal department. Twitter does not make this easy. Their "contact us" form doesn't have a section for "I want to report CSE material". https://help.twitter.com/en/contact-us But the post addresses are:

  Twitter, Inc.
  c/o Trust & Safety - Legal Policy
  1355 Market Street, Suite 900
  San Francisco, CA 94103

  Twitter International Company
  c/o Trust & Safety - Legal Policy
  One Cumberland Place
  Fenian Street
  Dublin 2
  D02 AX07
  Ireland

2) Contact their local law enforcement office, and point them to this page (for Twitter, but all services should have something similar) https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e...

3) Contact IWF or CEOP. IWF will generate hashes of the images and Twitter will, eventually, use those hashes to remove the images. This will take some time. https://www.iwf.org.uk/

[1] I'm only using that term for the Google search term.

tomjen3• 6 years ago

If they know they are hosting CP, are they legally responsible for it?

worldofmatthew• 6 years ago

I know some people cited section 223, allowing for prison for up to two years and or fined.

kevwil• 6 years ago

Moderation seems to be a very slippery slope. IMHO there's no way to truly win; policies eventually trend toward either absolute free speech or blatant censorship. This is the critical flaw in social media, as either trend is problematic. "The only way to win the game is not to play."

stretchcat12• 6 years ago

Moderation of this sort of content is so far away from any slope, it may as well be Flatland.

sonotmyname• 6 years ago

My wife has done some work with child exploitation organizations around this exact problem. Sadly, this is not a surprise at all. I’d venture that maybe 5% of the posts they report are removed, and the offending accounts are essentially never punished.

To make matters worse, given that pedophilia and child porn is now tied up with QAnon, some of her peers have started to have their accounts banned when they report this stuff, as apparently they’re being caught up in an anti-conspiracy filter.

Sigh...

teorema• 6 years ago

I feel increasingly lonely in wanting some kind of common carrier status social media platform. If not Twitter then a decentralized open source one.

WarOnPrivacy2• 6 years ago

NYPost didn't bother linking to the complaint or vetting any of the details of the case.

Complaint: https://endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/Doe-v-T...

Case history: https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/37985226/Doe_v_Twit...

The parties bringing the suit include The National Center on Sexual Exploitation. They are (unsurprisingly) an anti-porn org, formerly known as Morality in Media. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...

pardonmesir• 6 years ago

NYPost is just about the worst “mainstream” publication available and anything they’ve ever done devalues the technologies which transmit it and degrades the minds that consume it. Unfortunate to see them linked & highly ranked on HN.

WarOnPrivacy2• 6 years ago

The problems with NYP here is that their coverage is lazy and inept. That few details I added were the minimum that belonged in this story - and it was far from everything that was needed.

I'm not calling out the NYP here. Nearly every US news org is equally inept and lazy, no matter their ideology (real or perceived).

I acknowledge that not all orgs are like that. And often disappointing news outlets sometimes perform absolutely brilliant journalism (eg: Panama Papers).

But most basic reporting is just put out there, without even minimal vetting of details. We've long deserved better.

NotChina• 6 years ago

Inconsistency with a wordy explanation.

Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn

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