A small Dutch city took Twitter to courtroom on Friday to demand the social media firm take down all messages regarding a supposed ring of Devil-worshipping paedophiles alleged to have been energetic within the city within the Nineteen Eighties.
Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a city of about 35,000 inhabitants in the midst of the Netherlands, has been the main focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three males began spreading unfounded tales in regards to the abuse and homicide of youngsters they mentioned passed off within the city within the Nineteen Eighties.
The principle instigator of the tales mentioned he had childhood recollections of witnessing the abuse by a gaggle of individuals in Bodegraven.
The tales brought on a lot unrest in Bodegraven, as scores of followers of the lads’s tweets flocked to the native graveyard to put flowers and written messages on the graves of seemingly random lifeless youngsters, who they claimed have been victims of the satanic ring.
Twitter’s lawyer, Jens van den Brink, declined to remark earlier than the listening to at The Hague district courtroom on Friday.
Final yr the identical courtroom ordered the lads to right away take away all their tweets, threats and different on-line content material regarding the story and to ensure that none of it may ever emerge once more.
However regardless of their conviction, tales about Bodegraven nonetheless flow into on social media as others have continued to echo the claims, main the city to take the matter up with Twitter itself.
“If conspiracy theorists don’t take away their messages, then the platforms concerned must act,” the city of Bodegraven’s lawyer, Cees van de Sanden, was quoted as saying by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant on Friday.
Van de Sanden mentioned that in July the city requested that Twitter actively discover and take away all messages regarding the Bodegraven story – not solely these posted by the three convicted males – however had up to now not acquired a solution from the corporate.
The boys behind the Bodegraven story are all in jail, as they've been convicted in different courtroom circumstances for incitement and making demise threats to a variety of individuals together with the prime minister, Mark Rutte, and former well being minister Hugo de Jonge.
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