American social networking service Twitter has been dragged before a federal court in California for rejecting multiple requests to take down pornographic materials of a 13-year-old child said to be a victim of sex-trafficking.

The New York Post reported Thursday that handlers of the microblogging app had insisted that the massively shared lewd content of the teenager did not violate the firm’s policies.

The newspaper disclosed that the victim whose name was withheld, was lured into sending his nude photos by sex traffickers who posed as his 16-year-old female classmate on Snapchat nearly four years ago.

The teenager was subsequently blackmailed into sending obscene videos of himself, following threats from the traffickers, the Post said.

A suit filed by the victim’s mother on Wednesday stated that the pornographic materials, however, surfaced on Twitter in 2019, long after the teen had blocked his blackmailers on Snapchat.

It noted that the distraught family of the victim made several reports to Twitter, urging the tech firm to take down the video, which they claimed had subjected their “suicidal” child to “vicious bullying” by his classmates, but were ignored.

The suit added that Twitter’s belated response early 2020 to the explicit content that had amassed over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets read in part: “Thanks for reaching out. We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time.”

The videos were, however, deleted by the tech giant weeks later, upon request by an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, the Post reported.

Twitter strongly pushed back against the allegations in a statement to the Post, saying it would never tolerate child porn or other forms of rights abuses. 

“Twitter has zero-tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy.

“Our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors and to ensure we’re doing everything we can to remove content, facilitate investigations, and protect minors from harm — both on and offline,” the social media giant said. Twitter recently came under severe scrutiny for its perceived double standards, in light of its ramped up censorship of subscribers.

The global tech firm, which repeatedly prides itself as an organisation that “aggressively fights online child sexual abuse” had recently delisted the account of former U.S. President Donald Trump from its platform for allegedly inciting violence at the Capitol.