Appeals Court Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing Twitter of Sex Trafficking – Reason Magazine

Twitter prevails in sex trafficking case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has dismissed a lawsuit that accused Twitter of participating in a sex trafficking venture. The suit—which invoked the controversial 2018 Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—represented an important test case for how expansively FOSTA would be interpreted. The case was brought by two John Does and the group formerly known as Morality in Media, a conservative activist group that now goes by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). At the crux of the case are sexually oriented videos that the Does took of themselves when they were young teens. The teens shared these videos, via Snapchat, with an adult posing as a teenager. This person did not keep them private and they wound up circulating online. Years later, someone tweeted links to a compilation of these videos that was hosted on another website. Twitter eventually removed the tweets linking to the video (though it took a little more than a week after one Doe first reported them and a nudge from someone at the Department of Homeland Security, according to the NCOSE complaint). I wrote about this case in detail back in 2021, noting
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