Dutch village takes Twitter to court over…conspiracy theorists – “Satanic crimes and child sacrifices”

One dutch village linked to satanic crimes and child sacrifices on Twitter has lost its legal battle with the platform after a court ruled that the social networking site did enough to prevent the spread of this conspiratorial theory.

The municipality of Bodegrafen-Rijwijk, in the western Netherlands, sued Twitter in September, demanding that all posts linking the village to child-satanic crimes be deleted.

The “Bondegrafen story” was spread by three men, on various social media platforms, between January and June 2021. One of them claimed that 30 years ago he was a “witness and victim” of satanic rituals and murders of young children. They even appealed for people to go to the village to leave flowers and messages on the graves of the “victims”. Many dozens of people responded to this call.

In 2021 the village took legal action against the three men, who were forced to delete all the baseless stories they were spreading. But the municipality felt that Twitter did not do enough to prevent the spread of this story and requested that all posts referring to it be deleted. However, a court in The Hague ruled today that Twitter “did enough to remove the illegal content of Bodegrafen’s story from the platform”.

Twitter permanently deleted an account that was spreading “defamatory” stories about the village, as well as all reproductions of those posts.

According to Dutch media, this is the account of Micha Kat, a person who has previously accused many well-known Dutch people of pedophilia and is currently in prison.

Twitter “is not obliged to delete all messages in which the term ‘Bodegrafen’ is associated with the phrase ‘child abuse’ on its own initiative and without a request from the community,” the court ruled. The municipality should therefore follow the procedure of “inform and delete”: indicate the posts it considers illegal and request their deletion. “Not all of them are illegal and you can’t put a filter in that case,” he explained, adopting Twitter’s line of reasoning. The platform argued that introducing a filter would be against freedom of expression and would delete, among other things, even content that denies, for example, the existence of a network of murderous Satanists in the village.