Dutch city sues Twitter over false theory about Satanist pedophile network

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The small town of Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, in the Netherlands, has entered a legal battle against Twitter to demand that the platform take down a series of publications that associate the municipality with a conspiracy theory about pedophilia.

The place became the protagonist of the unfounded rumor two years ago, when three men – now imprisoned, according to the BBC – spread the unfounded story that there was, in the 1980s, a network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who abused children.

Last year, a local court ordered the three to remove all tweets on the matter. They are now in prison for incitement and death threats against several people, including the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, according to the BBC.

The administration of the city of 35 thousand inhabitants, however, wants the platform to remove all publications related to the topic, even if from other users, and justifies that the subject has been a trigger for public disturbances in the region.

Followers of the men who created the story even gathered at a local cemetery to place flowers and messages on the graves of dead children who, as far as we know, had nothing to do with crimes of sexual violence.

The episode has been used as an argument for the deletion of posts. “It is very painful, and sometimes even threatening, for the relatives of deceased children, as well as for those who are wrongly accused,” Christiaan van der Kamp, mayor of Bodegraven-Reeuwijk at the time, told the Dutch network RTL.

During a court hearing in The Hague that discussed the matter on Friday, Bodegraven-Reeuwijk’s lawyer Cees van de Zanden argued that if “conspiracy theorists do not remove the messages”, the platforms involved must act.

He claimed that he asked Twitter in July to find and actively remove all posts related to the story, but that he has not received any response from the company. Twitter’s attorney, Jens van den Brink, declined to comment.

In 2021, one of the men behind the rumours, Wouter R., then 53, was sentenced to nine months in prison for distributing threatening videos to figures like the small town’s attorney.

The Justice alleged that he had exceeded the limits of freedom of expression by sharing content that incited violence, with baseless stories about the pedophile network, and accusing the lawyer and others of hiding crimes of child abuse.

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