After a week of urgent litigation, the Johannesburg high court has ordered Meta, owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, to hand over — “to the extent available” — the names, addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses of the people behind the profiles and WhatsApp channels posting graphic child pornography.
The court also ordered Meta and WhatsApp to remove 12 WhatsApp channels and 58 Instagram accounts, insofar as it was technically feasible, and for two years, whenever similar content is reported to them, they must take action within 48 hours.
The profiles and channels were posting “graphic child pornography, devastating personal information, allegations of children being HIV positive — all the while identifying individuals and schools”, said the Digital Law Company’s (DLC) Emma Sadleir in court papers.
An annexure to the court papers attached some of the content that had been uploaded on these profiles. It included:
- a video of what was claimed to be schoolchildren having sex in the toilets;
- posts of children’s names and their schools, claiming they had STIs; and
- pornographic photos and videos of young girls.
The order was made by agreement after settlement negotiations between Meta and the DLC. The agreement came in the face of an application for contempt of court that could have seen Meta official Thabo Makenete at risk of being sent to prison if Meta failed to comply with a new Saturday deadline.
In court on Friday, counsel for the DLC, Ben Winks, quoted Nelson Mandela, whose birthday it was on that day: “Our children are our greatest treasure, those that abuse them tear at the fabric of society, those are the tenets that all the parties could agree on.”
After court, the DLC said the case set a “critical precedent”.
“We believe this is the first time in South African legal history that a global tech giant has agreed, in writing and in court, to these sort of terms — and we hope it signals a turning point in how platforms respond to harm in our jurisdiction.”
The court order followed a week of urgent litigation. After an urgent application on Monday night, the court ordered Meta and three officials to:
- immediately and permanently remove six WhatsApp channels and 30 Instagram profiles;
- immediately and permanently disable the person behind the accounts from creating any further profiles; and
- hand over information about the identity of the person.
After the court order, the Instagram profiles and some of the WhatsApp channels were deleted — either by Meta or their creator — but some of the WhatsApp channels remained active.
On Wednesday the DLC applied for Meta and Makenete to be held in contempt. Sadleir said new WhatsApp channels and Instagram accounts were “being created every few minutes, soliciting and publishing private and pornographic information, images and videos involving South African children”.
“That is why the order to disable and the disorder to disclose are so important,” she said.
In the DLC’s contempt application, it asked the court to order a new deadline for compliance — Saturday — failing which the DLC could have come back to court to secure Makenete’s imprisonment. That potential course has now been avoided.
On Friday morning an agreement had been reached between the parties.
TimesLIVE
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