Twitter told to respond to Bodegraven story

AMSTERDAM A Dutch court rejected calls from the town of Bodegraven-Reeuwijk for Twitter to do more to deal with allegations that a ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles were active in the town in the 1980s.

The District Court in The Hague concluded that the social media giant had done enough to remove unlawful content about the Bodegraven story'' from its platform, and suspended a Twitter account that contained defamatory and inflammatory tweets about the story.

The town of around 35,000 inhabitants took Twitter to court last month and demanded it remove all messages related to unfounded stories of children being abused and murdered in Bodegraven decades ago.

Bodegraven has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, with strangers flocking to the local cemetery to lay flowers and write messages at the graves of dead children.

The court said it would not order Twitter to remove other tweets relating to the stories from other accounts, but it said it would tell the company to respond immediately to concrete removal requests from Bodegraven-Reeuwijk.

There was a good filter to create a good filter to find Bodegraven stories that would not affect legal content, according to Twitter.

Three men accused of slaying the Bodegraven story are currently in jail after being convicted in court cases for incitement and making death threats to people, including prime minister Mark Rutte and former health minister Hugo de Jonge.