The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Facebook was liable to be held responsible for the use of its services by pimps.

US state judges have ruled that three civil complaints filed by Houston women victims of sex trafficking were valid.

Teenagers, they had been contacted, harassed and recruited on messaging applications, such as Messenger, belonging to Facebook, indicates the

Houston Chronicle

.

The three plaintiffs accused the Californian giant of "negligence" and failure to meet its obligations in terms of liability.

15 years old at the time of the incident

They also accused Facebook of having benefited from their prostitution and believed that the platform should have alerted them to the risks of sex trafficking and done everything to avoid them.

Texans also explained that in their eyes, Facebook had brought credibility to their pimps.

Those who were 14 and 15 years old respectively at the time of the events dating back to 2012, 2016 and 2017, deemed the apps used "devoid of any limits".

They claimed that the platforms promote "the harassment, exploitation, recruitment, extortion and predation of children" with the aim of turning them into sex trafficking.

The question of accountability of web giants

The decision of the justices of the Supreme Court of Texas insisted on the accountability of the Internet giants.

The magistrates wanted to differentiate between the misdeeds of the platforms themselves and those committed by their users, which they cannot be blamed.

They said the law should not "create an anarchic no-man's land on the Internet in which states do not have the power to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the hell of traffic. human beings online ”.

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