More than 1,000 youths in Denmark could be charged following the spread of obscene video clips and photos of two 15-year-olds having sex. The materials were shared through Facebook Messenger since 2015 until 2017.
Facebook Inc tipped off the US authorities, who informed police in Denmark of the said clips where a girl and a boy were involved in consensual sex. Around 800 boys and 200 girls, most of them between the ages of 15 and 20, and four younger people from the country have reportedly circulated the material in 2015 until the autumn of 2017.
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"This is a very large and complex case, which has taken a long time to investigate, especially because of the large number (of people) being charged," says police investigator Lau Thygesen from the northern Danish region of Nordsjaelland.
Some suspects who are 18-year-olds and above were summoned to police stations for investigation, while suspects under 18 were reached by their guardians.
Once proven guilty of these charges, suspects could face a possible conditional prison sentence of about 20 days. Suspects who are guilty of distributing indecent images of children could be listed for 10 years on a register of child pornography offenders.
A Danish police superintendent stressed that this should be a warning to teenagers never to upload or share videos with lewd content on social media platforms.
In 2017, the social media giant released the rule book for moderators to use when censoring the posts of its nearly two billion users. This came after the global backlash for failing to stop the distribution of images containing violence, sex, hate speech and other morally questionable materials.
