X is not completely out of the woods yet when it comes to a major lawsuit alleging child sexual abuse on its platform. On Friday, a US District Court of Appeals judge ruled that X Corp. faced new allegations that the company was negligent in removing content related to child sexual abuse and that it did not have an effective infrastructure for reporting such crimes.
this test by Judge Danielle Forrest is the latest step in a lawsuit against Twitter in 2021 before the company took action
An earlier decision by a three-judge panel unanimously concluded: This latest decision by Judge Forrest agrees with parts of the earlier decision, but says that
According to the indictment, the case concerns two boys aged 13 and 14, who were tricked by online sex dealers into sending sexually explicit images. The illegal content was then posted on Twitter, and the 13-year-old boy filed a complaint through Twitter’s content reporting interface, as described in the lawsuit. The boy’s mother also filed a complaint, but got nothing more than an automated response and first had to get a response that Twitter had found no policy violations and would take no further action, the lawsuit said. The suit alleges that Twitter eventually removed the post nine days after it was first published, suspended the author’s account and reported the content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as required by federal law. The case could set an important precedent for the operation of social media platforms, especially if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, but thanks to this recent ruling, X will first have to defend these allegations again in court.