Facebook highlights anti-sex trafficking work amid lawsuit

Facebook is defending its work in stopping human-trafficking on its platform amid a lawsuit accusing it of not doing enough on the matter.

“Human trafficking is abhorrent and is not allowed on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Thursday a few days after a woman in Texas sued the company.

{mosads}Facebook explained that the platform uses “technology to thwart this kind of abuse” and that they “encourage people to use the reporting links found across” Facebook so that its experts can assess it.

“Facebook also works closely with anti-trafficking organizations and other technology companies, and we report all apparent instances of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC,” the spokesperson continued.

A woman in Texas, referred to as Jane Doe in court documents, sued the company in Harris County District Court in Houston earlier this week.

Doe said that she was coerced into sex work by a man who added her as a friend on Facebook. She charged that the social media company did not do enough to vet his identity or warn of sex traffickers on the site.

She met the man after he said he would console her following a fight with her mother. When they met though he beat and raped her, then posted her picture to do sex work on the now-defunct Backpage.com classifieds site, according to details of the suit reviewed by Reuters.

Doe’s lawsuit comes several months after Congress passed the SESTA/FOSTA or Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, to hold internet companies more legally liable for sex trafficking on their platforms.

They were previously protected from liability on all types of content their users posted through Section 230 of The Communications and Decency Act.