After three Houston-area lawsuits were filed against Facebook alleging sex traffickers used its platform to commit crimes, Facebook asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene. In response, the highest court in Texas ruled that Facebook could be held liable for sex traffickers using its platform, arguing Facebook isn’t a “lawless no-man’s-land.”
Facebook has argued for over a decade that it’s immune from prosecution because of Section 230, a federal regulation that has broadly been used by courts to grant immunity to social media companies when publishing, un-publishing or censoring content on their platforms.
The state Supreme Court rejected Facebook’s argument, noting a marked shift from previous court rulings.
Last October, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a 10-page statement on Section 230, arguing that when Congress first enacted the statute, “most of today’s major Internet platforms did not exist. And in the 24 years since, we have never interpreted this provision. But many courts have construed the law broadly to confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.”
Instead, courts have “departed from the most natural reading of the text by giving Internet companies immunity for their own content,” he wrote.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton lauded the court’s ruling, noting that the federal Communications Decency Act does not leave states powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly benefit from participation in human trafficking. --->READ MORE HERE
A stunning new report ties social media platforms - the most prominent of which is Facebook - to "the majority" of online recruitment in active sex trafficking cases.
The data was revealed in the Human Trafficking Institute's 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report, according to CBS.
Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros said on CBSN Wednesday: "The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites. Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases."
The report uses data from every criminal and civil human trafficking case that's active. "This report actually looks at the last 20 years of trends in the federal government," Boutros continued --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
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