The adult who began messaging her had images on his profile of “scantily-clad young women in sexual positions” with money stuffed in their mouths and “other deeply troubling content,” the justices wrote. One young woman who sued was 15 when a friend of a mutual friend reached out to her on Facebook in 2012. On : The Track: Open-air sex trade permeates daily life on Houston’s outskirts The young women said in court filings that the social media giant cloaked traffickers with credibility and provided “a point of first contact between sex traffickers and these children” and “an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade.” The lawsuits were brought by three Houston women recruited as teens through Facebook apps and trafficked as a result of those online connections. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction. The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.” “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. “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,” the opinion said.

The majority wrote, “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.”

Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.įacebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. On : Houston woman sues Facebook for aiding in her being sex trafficked as teen

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