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.
