Tony “The Pimp Defender” Ortega May Be Silent On Sex Trafficking But His Vile Rhetoric Still Echoes

Tony Ortega

More information following our reporting on the developing bombshell Twitter child sex trafficking case we first told our readers about yesterday.

Indeed, the more we learn about the particulars of this case the clearer and more alarming we see the criminal pattern between the exploitation of minors on the Twitter platform and what was done to victimize the underage youth during Tony Ortega’s deceitful tenure as craven outspoken mouthpiece for the corporate pimps of Backpage.

Last week’s potentially landmark filing states that the anonymous boy, known only as John Doe, was solicited and recruited for sex trafficking as a minor. But after Doe escaped from the manipulation, child sexual abuse videos that he was featured in were disseminated on Twitter. Coerced and without consent, just like the lowlife traffickers ran their illicit child sex ring on Backpage, while Ortega and others pretended to turn a blind eye.

According to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSOE), Doe was horrified to find out that the videos made when he was 13 under the duress of sex traffickers were posted to Twitter. His parents reportedly contacted authorities and Twitter to ask that the posts be taken down immediately.

Using the same Ortega-endorsed playbook, the NCOSE alleges that instead of removing the video content, Twitter reported back to the family that the material did not violate any of the company’s policies.

As the lawsuit argues:

“When Twitter was first alerted to this fact and John Doe’s age, Twitter refused to remove the illegal material and instead continued to promote and profit from the sexual abuse of this child.”

Remember when Tony Ortega loudly and obstinately defended Backpage using the same poor excuse about policy and the rights of Internet platforms to police themselves under the guise of his lax interpretation of First Amendment rights? So do we. And we don’t see things have changed much.

Sickeningly, online sex predators are still using the same rhetoric Ortega popularized even way back then.

In fact so little seems to have changed that Senior Legal Counsel for the NCOSE, Peter Gentala, makes the same complaint campaigners were making against Tony Ortega’s paper-thin defense of Backpage:

“As John Doe’s situation makes clear, Twitter is not committed to removing child sex abuse material from its platform…Even worse, Twitter contributes to and profits from the sexual exploitation of countless individuals because of its harmful practices and platform design. Despite its public expressions to the contrary, Twitter is swarming with uploaded child pornography and Twitter management does little or nothing to prevent it.”

Remarkably, if unsurprisingly, the corporate heads at Twitter are playing the same sort of semantical game Tony Ortega pushed, claiming they have a “zero-tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation” even as they continue to do business off backs of those whose lives they are destroying in the process.

One is almost left to wonder if shameless opportunist like Tony Ortega isn’t half considering taking the Twitter team to court for so blatantly plagiarizing his mealy-mouthed Backpage apologism to defend of their own inexcusable actions. It’s certainly no exaggeration to suggest that Twitter’s official response claiming they “aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy,” could have been taken word for word straight from Tony “The Pimp Defender” Ortega himself.