Twitter is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a child sex trafficking victim and relying on Section 230 to do so.
The controversial section of the Communications Decency Act, which has recently come under fire from conservatives, is a critical part of Twitter’s argument for the dismissal of the case.
“Given that Twitter’s alleged liability here rests on its failure to remove content from its platform, dismissal of the Complaint with prejudice is warranted on this ground alone,” the social media platform argued.
“The lawsuit, filed in January, is accusing the Silicon Valley company of knowingly benefiting financially from the dissemination of sexual abuse material when it failed to immediately act on multiple complaints and correspondences asking it to remove the illegal and hurtful content,” the Epoch Times summarizes.
“Twitter is not a passive, inactive, intermediary in the distribution of this harmful material; rather, Twitter has adopted an active role in the dissemination and knowing promotion and distribution of this harmful material,” the lawsuit notes before blaming “Twitter’s own policies, practices, business model, and technology architecture.”
The lawsuit also outlines how Twitter failed to report child sexual abuse content in a timely fashion, allowing the content to be viewed over 167,000 times and re-tweeted 2,200 times before it was removed.
Twitter defended the delay by emphasizing how the “sheer volume” of Tweets posted to the platform render it “simply not possible for Twitter … to remove all offending content immediately or accurately in all cases.”
