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Court convicts man of sex chats with kids

A 40-year-old man from Uppsala, north of Stockholm, was convicted by the district court on Thursday for encouraging young girls to strip on the internet.

Published: 16 December 2011 08:10 CET

The man had been charged with making or trying to make a number of girls, some as young as 8 or 9, take their clothes off and act in a sexual way in front of their webcams.

According to local paper UNT, the man carried out most of his activities from his work place within the local authority.

Colleagues finally reported the man, suspicious of what he was up to on work time.

Although the man chose to leave his position willingly when exposed by police, he would have been forced to go anyway, according to municipality authorities.

When police searched the man’s work computer and his private computer at home, they discovered footage of an 11-year-old girl posing in front of her mobile phone camera.

During the investigation, the man’s internet chats were traced to a number of girls, and police found evidence of his urging them to take their clothes off.

No threats allegedly occurred and the man was generally open about his age. In similar cases perpetrators often use a false identity and pretend to be the same age as the girls.

The man was found guilty of getting the young girls to pose in a sexual manner, and will undergo a special treatment plan against sexual offenses.

Had he been sentenced to prison he would have served four months, according to UNT.

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COURT

French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts

A French court has ordered Twitter to give activists full access to all its documents relating to efforts to combat racism, sexism and other forms of hate speech on the social network.

Published: 7 July 2021 10:03 CEST
French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts
Photo: Alastair Pike | AFP

Six anti-discrimination groups had taken Twitter to court in France last year, accusing the US social media giant of “long-term and persistent” failures in blocking hateful comments from the site.

The Paris court ordered Twitter to grant the campaign groups full access to all documents relating to the company’s efforts to combat hate speech since May 2020. The ruling applies to Twitter’s global operation, not just France.

Twitter must hand over “all administrative, contractual, technical or commercial documents” detailing the resources it has assigned to fighting homophobic, racist and sexist discourse on the site, as well as “condoning crimes against humanity”.

The San Francisco-based company was given two months to comply with the ruling, which also said it must reveal how many moderators it employs in France to examine posts flagged as hateful, and data on the posts they process.

The ruling was welcomed by the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), one of the groups that had taken the social media giant to court.

“Twitter will finally have to take responsibility, stop equivocating and put ethics before profit and international expansion,” the UEJF said in a statement on its website.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy bans users from promoting violence, or threatening or attacking people based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability, among other forms of discrimination.

Like other social media businesses it allows users to report posts they believe are hateful, and employs moderators to vet the content.

But anti-discrimination groups have long complained that holes in the policy allow hateful comments to stay online in many cases.

French prosecutors on Tuesday said they have opened an investigation into a wave of racist comments posted on Twitter aimed at members of the country’s national football team.

The comments, notably targeting Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe, were posted after France was eliminated from the Euro 2020 tournament last week.

France has also been having a wider public debate over how to balance the right to free speech with preventing hate speech, in the wake of the controversial case of a teenager known as Mila.

The 18-year-old sparked a furore last year when her videos, criticising Islam in vulgar terms, went viral on social media.

Thirteen people are on trial accused of subjecting her to such vicious harassment that she was forced to leave school and was placed under police protection.

While President Emmanuel Macron is among those who have defended her right to blaspheme, left-wing critics say her original remarks amounted to hate speech against Muslims.

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