A small Dutch town took Twitter ( TWTR.N ) to court on Friday to ask the social media giant to remove all messages related to an alleged ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles it accused of that were active in the town in the 1980s.
Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a town of about 35,000 in the central Netherlands, has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three men began spreading what they say are unfounded stories about child abuse and murder. The city in the 1980s.
The main instigator of the stories said that he has childhood memories of witnessing abuse by a group of people in Bodigraven.
The stories caused quite a stir in Bodigraven, as the men’s tweet followers flocked to the local cemetery to lay flowers and leave written messages on the graves of seemingly random dead children, who they claimed were haunted by demons. were victims of
Twitter’s lawyer, Jens van den Brink, declined to comment ahead of Friday’s hearing at The Hague District Court.
Last year, the same court ordered the men to immediately remove all their tweets, threats and other online content related to the story and ensure that none of it resurfaces.
But despite his conviction, stories about Bodegraven still circulate on social media as others continue to echo his story, prompting the town to take up the matter with Twitter itself.
“If the conspiracy theorists don’t remove their messages, the platforms involved need to take action,” Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant quoted Bodi Grauen’s lawyer Sze van de Zenden as saying on Friday.
In July, the town asked Twitter to actively seek out and remove all messages related to the Bodie Graven story, not only those posted by the three convicts, but also by U.S. There was no response from the company.
All those behind the Bodegraven story are currently in prison, having been convicted in other court cases of inciting and threatening to kill a number of people, including Prime Minister Mark Rutte and former Health Minister Hugo de Jong.
