A lawsuit was filed by the loved ones of those killed in the 2022 Buffalo grocery store mass shooting, on Friday (May 12) against a number of social media companies for allegedly, facilitating the convicted shooter’s “racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist propaganda.”
The 144-page lawsuit was filed by Buffalo civil attorney John Elmore on behalf of the victims’ families in the State Supreme Court in Buffalo, New York. It is also supported by Social Media Victims Law Center and Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The lawsuit names tech giants like Facebook parent company Meta, Twitch owner Amazon, Google parent company Alphabet which also owns Youtube, and Snapchat owner Snap, as well as Discord, Reddit and what has been described as a dark website 4Chan. The convicted mass shooter Payton Gendron had used Twitch to live stream the rampage.
Among those named were also Vintage Firearms company and the RMA Armament company which are said to be the defendant’s gun dealer and body armour company as well as his parents. The mass shooting took place at a Tops store on the city’s predominantly Black east side in May 2022 where 10 Black people were killed.
Gendron, the 19-year-old mass shooter, was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year after a federal grand jury indicted Gendron on 27 counts involving weapons and hate crimes, including 10 counts involving hate crimes that resulted in fatalities.
What does the lawsuit say?
The lawsuit alleges, “Gendron was motivated to commit his heinous crime by racist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist propaganda fed to him by the social media companies whose products he used”.
The lawsuit also said that social media allowed and aided the spread of Gendron’s hate where the live stream of his rampage came to be known as the “murder video” and was viewed by more than three million people. According to the suit, despite being taken down from Twitch the video was downloaded to 4chan.
The copy of the video also “appeared on Facebook next to advertisements,” the lawsuit stated, adding that while it was “eventually turned off banner advertising for searches related to the Buffalo shooting, the murder video continued to circulate on Facebook and, on information and belief, Facebook’s algorithms continued to recommend it.”
According to the suit, Gendron had become “addicted” to Facebook, Youtube, and Snapchat. It was “because of the dangerously defective and unreasonably dangerous algorithms powering Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, Gendron quickly became a problematic user of the Social Media Defendants’ products,” said the lawsuit.
“Taking full advantage of the incomplete development of Gendron’s frontal lobe, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat maintained his product engagement by directing him to increasingly extreme and violent content,” the lawsuit alleges.
It also blamed Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat and said it is because their “algorithms were designed with the singular goal of maximizing Gendron’s product engagement over his psychological, emotional, and ethical well-being, by directing him to sites promoting hate and violence these products were functioning as designed and intended.”
The lawsuit also alleges that he was not raised by a racist family, live in a radically polarised community or had a personal history of negative interactions with Black people, reported ABC News. The recently filed lawsuit also comes two days before Buffalo residents commemorate the one-year mark since the mass shooting.
“These posts led him down a rabbit hole of increasingly radical sites, where he was indoctrinated in white supremacist replacement theory and violent accelerationism,” said Matthew Bergman from Social Media Victims Law Center, in a statement.
He also went on to say that this “horrible crime was neither an accident nor coincidence, but rather the foreseeable result of social media companies’ intentional decision to maximize user engagement over public safety.”
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