Jens van den Brink, Twitter’s lawyer, wouldn’t say anything before the hearing.
The Hague A small Dutch town took Twitter (TWTR.N) to court on Friday to demand that the social media giant remove all messages about a supposed ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles who were said to have been active in the town in the 1980s.
Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a town in the middle of the Netherlands with about 35,000 people, has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three men started spreading false stories about the abuse and murder of children in the town in the 1980s.
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The main person who started the stories said he remembered being abused by a group of people in Bodegraven when he was a child.
The stories caused a lot of trouble in Bodegraven. Many people who followed the men’s tweets went to the local graveyard and put flowers and notes on the graves of children who seemed to have died of natural causes. They said the children had been killed by a Satanic ring.
Before Friday’s hearing at The Hague District Court, Twitter’s lawyer, Jens van den Brink, refused to say anything.
Last year, the same court told the men they had to take down all their tweets, threats, and other online content about the case right away and make sure none of it could ever come back.
But even though they were found guilty, stories about Bodegraven still spread on social media because other people keep repeating their story. This led the town to take the issue up with Twitter.
The lawyer for the town of Bodegraven, Cees van de Zanden, was quoted in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant on Friday as saying, “If conspiracy theorists don’t remove their messages, then the platforms need to act.”
Van de Zanden said that in July, the town asked Twitter to find and delete all messages about the Bodegraven case, including those posted by the three convicted men, but the U.S. company hasn’t responded yet.
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The men behind the Bodegraven story are all in jail right now because they were found guilty in other cases of inciting violence and making death threats against many people, including Prime Minister Mark Rutte and former Health Minister Hugo de Jonge.