State Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth) has requested the Texas Department of Public Safety and the attorney general requesting an investigation into online companies MindGeek and Pornhub.
The legislator cited recent complaints about the company to Congress.
“In a day and age when we are doing everything we can to combat human/sex trafficking and child exploitation, this site is fanning the flames of those evil activities,” Krause tweeted.
In his letter to Texas officials requesting an investigation, Krause said it should "discover why the sexual assault of women and children, child sexual material and non-consensual intimate images are being uploaded and distributed on Internet platforms in Texas."
Meanwhile, the Texas Supreme Court has refused to dismiss lawsuits against Facebook from plaintiffs who allege they were victims of sex trafficking and became “entangled with their abusers” on the social media site.
They accused Facebook of negligence for allegedly failing to take adequate measures to prevent sex trafficking on its site. Facebook argues the lawsuits are barred by a provision of the federal Communications Decency Act, Section 230.
The Texas Supreme Court dismissed some of the plaintiffs' claims but upheld others.
“The plaintiffs’ statutory human-trafficking claims may proceed but their common law claims for negligence, gross negligence, negligent undertaking and products liability must be dismissed,” the court ruled.
Specifically, the court held that Facebook is not immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act.
“We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking,” the court said. “Holding Internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it. Holding Internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”
A 2016 study by the University of Texas Austin found that were an estimated 313,000 victims of human trafficking in the Lone Star State.
Prostitution causes psychological harm, with 68% of prostitutes suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, according to another study of 854 men and women in nine countries.
