John Doe, et al. v. Twitter, Inc.; X Corp.

San Francisco, California employment law lawyers represented the Plaintiffs who sued Defendant claiming that it hosted illegal content -- namely, child porn.



When Plaintiff John Doe #1 was 13 years old, he communicated on Snapchat with an individual who Doe #1 thought was his classmate. The Snapchat user requested nude images from Doe #1 and his friend, Plaintiff John Doe #2, who both complied. In reality, the Snapchat user was a child-pornography trafficker who used the images to blackmail Plaintiffs into producing additional pornographic images.



Eventually, Plaintiffs cut off communication with the trafficker. But a video of the compiled images that they sent

to the trafficker later appeared on Twitter, which Plaintiffs learned about when the video circulated around their high

school. Doe #1 and his mother then began efforts to convince Twitter to remove the video.



Doe #1 filed a complaint through Twitter's content-reporting interface, and Twitter instructed him to send a copy8 D OE 1 V. T WITTER , I NC . of his identification to confirm he was the person in the reported video. He sent his ID and reiterated that the video depicted him and his friend, both minors. Doe #1's mother also reported the posts to Twitter the following day. A few days later, having received nothing but an initial automated response, Doe #1's mother followed up with Twitter to protest its inaction. A couple days after that, Twitter informed Doe #1 that it reviewed the posts, found no policy violations, and would take no further action. In the meantime, the posts received over 150,000 views and 2,000 retweets. Ultimately, nine days after Doe #1's initial report to Twitter, and only at the prompting of the Department of Homeland Security, Twitter removed the posts, suspended the posters' accounts, and reported the content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).



Plaintiffs allege that this episode was not aberrant. Despite developing a variety of tools to monitor and remove

content on the platform and having a zero-tolerance policy for child exploitation, Twitter, according to the complaint, is a significant repository for child pornography. Plaintiffs allege Twitter both underutilizes the tools it has developed to curb the spread of this illegal content and has passed on opportunities to develop better tools, despite the inadequacy of its existing infrastructure. Finally, given Twitter's business model, it receives significant advertising revenue from hosting sought-after or popular posts, including those that depict pornographic content featuring minors.

The 9th Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court’s judgment, and remanded, in a case in which the district court dismissed a complaint in which Plaintiffs—two minor boys—sued Twitter after it slow-walked its esponse to reports about, and did not immediately remove from the platform, pornographic content that a trafficker had coerced Plaintiffs into producing.