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Lawmaker: Sites need to remove harmful content or pay fines
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Tom Pastian, Hialeah
TALLAHASSEE - State Rep. Scott Plakon filed a bill Tuesday seeking to punish social media platforms that don’t act swiftly enough to remove child pornography from their websites, in a case involving a Florida teenager who had a video of a sex act involving him and another person posted to Twitter against his will.
“For far too long social media has been used by predators to harm children,” Plakon, R-Longwood, said in a prepared statement.
“If online platforms like Twitter refuse to stop these crimes on their own, we will empower parents to hold them accountable.”
The bill, HB 995, would fine a company $100,000 each day the illicit material isn’t taken down, in addition to any civil penalties awarded by the courts for damages. Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, is sponsoring the Senate version of the bill, SB 1308.
Lisa Haba of the Haba Law Firm and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation are suing Twitter on behalf of the teen and his mother, who are named as John Doe and Jane Doe in the suit to protect the minor’s identity.
The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California federal court last month, alleges Twitter refused to take the child pornography down for nine days after it was notified and only after the Department of Homeland Security got involved. It alleges Twitter profited from sex trafficking and failed to report child sexual abuse material and was negligent. It seeks damages to be determined at trial.
“Our lawsuit seeks to shine a light on how Twitter has enabled and profited from child sexual abuse material on its platform, choosing profits over people, money over the safety of children and wealth at the expense of human freedom and dignity,” said Haba, a former Seminole County prosecutor who specialized in human trafficking cases.
Haba said the bill is the first of its kind in the country aimed at punishing social media companies for not doing enough to prevent child exploitation and abuse on their platforms.
Twitter representatives did not respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
Haba’s complaint details the case of the teen, who was manipulated into engaging in
sex acts on video four years ago, when he was 13.
The teen sent a nude photo to a person on a social media platform he thought was a 16-year-old girl. The person then began blackmailing him, threatening to send the photos to his “parents, coach, pastor and others in the community” if he didn’t send videos of himself engaging in sexual acts with another person, the lawsuit says. He complied at first but later tried to cut off contact.
A compilation of the videos was posted to Twitter in 2019 by at least two accounts and retweeted more than 2,000 times.
The teen found out about the posting on Jan. 19 or Jan. 20, 2020, and “faced teasing, harassment, vicious bullying, and became suicidal,” according to the complaint.
The victim himself alerted the company about the video within a day. Twitter’s initial reaction was to ask the teen to confirm his identity, but after he did so no action was taken because the material didn’t violate the company’s policies, the complaint alleges.
“What do you mean you don’t see a problem?” the teen told the company. “We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.”
Only after the teen’s mother reached out to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who warned Twitter to take the videos down, was the material removed.
One of the Twitter accounts that posted the material was removed but is posting under a similar name, the complaint alleges.
Although local law enforcement was also notified of the case, the complaint doesn’t name the agency involved for fear of identifying the victim. It’s unclear what, if anything, was done by local law enforcement to investigate the person or persons who manipulated the victim and published the videos.
Plakon’s bill is the latest from Florida Republicans looking to target Big Tech giants. Led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, bills aimed at curbing purported online censorship of conservatives and allowing users to prevent the dissemination of their data by Twitter, Facebook,
Apple and other tech companies have been filed ahead of the legislative
session that begins March 2.