A Dutch town lost a court case asking Twitter to do more to stop the spread of a false conspiracy theory that claimed it was home to a ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
Bodegraven Reeuwijk in the western Netherlands sued the social media company in September over the unfounded rumours spread by three men since 2021.
Dozens of people had flocked to the municipality of 34,000 people to lay flowers and messages in a graveyard of so-called victims after conspiracy theorists latched on to the claims.
A judge at the Hague district court said that Twitter had done enough to remove unlawful content about the story of Bodegraven from its platform. The court said that it had permanently suspended an account with defamatory and inflammatory tweets about the city and removed all retweets from the account.
It said that the US firm was not obliged to remove any other tweets of its own accord. That is going too far in this case. One of the three men behind the spreading of the rumours said he had been abused in the 1980s and had since recovered memories of witnessing satanic rituals and the murder of young children.
In June, the accuser and one of the others were convicted of sedition, threats and defamation by a Dutch court, which ruled there was no proof of a satanic paedophile network.
The third man was arrested in August 2021 in Northern Ireland and handed over to the Netherlands a year later for trial on the same charges.
After the tide of conspiracy theorists led to great unrest and anger among the residents, especially the parents of children buried at the cemetery, authorities in Bodegraven imposed an emergency order last year.
They asked Twitter to remove tweets from the three men, but also to ask people to visit to commemorate victims, but the court ruled that a blanket ban would affect too much legal content on Twitter. The judge said that not everything is illegal, and a good filter can't be made in this case.