Texas Supreme Court Rules Facebook Can Be Held Liable For Sex Trafficking

(The AEGIS Alliance) – The highest court in Texas has made a ruling that Facebook is able to be held liable for sex trafficking performed on its own social media site platforms following a number of victims accusing the business of intentionally gaining from its internet assistance.

The ruling on Friday made by Texas’ state Supreme Court makes it possible for 3 civil suits by trafficking victims to continue versus the social media titan following the court establishing that existing regulations don’t enable Facebook, or even some other internet site, to function as a “lawless no-man’s-land,” according to the Houston Chronicle’s initial report.

The victims have implicated Facebook in breaching a state anti-trafficking regulation that became law in 2009 known as Chapter 98 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code which makes a defendant that traffics a person or that deliberately or purposefully gains from the action, liable to the victim.

In February, Facebook had asked the court to reject the legal actions that had been filed by 3 women that pointed out when they were teens they had been dragged into the sexual activity trade by pimps making use of the business’s social media sites.

The Houston Chronicle reported on one of these cases and wrote that the victim stated she had only been 14 years of age when a man on Instagram contacted her, which is an internet property of Facebook. She pointed out the man wound up raping her as well as marketing her as a prostitute on the platform. After the girl was rescued from the operation, her Instagram account remained to be utilized to entice other underage children. The victim’s mom stated she reported what occurred to Facebook yet the business didn’t respond.

The plaintiffs implicate Facebook of “creating a breeding ground for sex traffickers to stalk and entrap survivors.” Instead of applying ways to shield minors that’d require users to verify their identity and be additionally selective with its advertising and marketing, Facebook is implicated in opting for an increase in its own income margins.

Facebook claimed that Section 230 of the federal government Communications Decency Act, which became law in 1996, shields online service providers from being held liable for materials published by its users, and also liability for regulating it.

But the Texas justices rejected that defense claim on Friday, asserting that Facebook contributed to helping with the illegal actions. It additionally took note that in 2018, Congress amended Section 230 to ensure that civil liability can be imposed on internet sites that breach state and federal human trafficking regulations.

“We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking,” the justices stated in their majority opinion.

“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it. Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”

Facebook stated it will consider its next measures to take.

“Sex trafficking is abhorrent and not allowed on Facebook,” a Facebook representative said. “We will continue our fight against the spread of this content and the predators who engage in it.”

An attorney for one of the victims taking legal action against Facebook mentioned their job doesn’t cease here.

“Our clients have fought for over two years for the chance to bring their case,” lawyer Annie McAdams pointed out. “While we have a long road ahead, we are grateful that the Texas Supreme Court will allow these courageous trafficking survivors to have their day in court against Facebook. With the help of Chapter 98 protection, we believe trafficking survivors in Texas can expose and hold accountable businesses such as Facebook that benefit from these crimes of exploitation.”

Since 2013, the worldwide web has been the most typical thing to use for human trafficking recruitment, a 2020 report by the Human Trafficking Institute found.

Over fifty percent of all internet victim recruitments into sex trafficking cases that happened in 2020 occurred on Facebook, “making it by far the most frequently referenced website or app in public sources connected with these prosecutions, which was also true in 2019,” the report discovered.

After Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are the two most regularly cited social media site platforms for recruiting child victims.

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.