Last Wednesday, two days before the anniversary of the fatal Tops grocery store mass shooting in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, NY, lawyers representing the victims’ families announced a landmark, “far-reaching wrongful death lawsuit.”
The lawsuit contends that then 19-year-old shooter Payton Gendron “was not racist until he became addicted to social media apps,” claiming they radicalized Gendron, “which directly lead him to carrying out the deadly shooting.” It argues that the social media companies contributed to him “load[ing] that gun,” which would end up killing 10 Black people along with injuring three in the racist attack.
The 176-page suit was filed with the New York State Supreme Court and mentions nearly a dozen companies “including Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Amazon (which owns Twitch), Google, YouTube, Discord and 4Chan. Other companies named in the lawsuit as defendants include RMA Armament — a body-armor manufacturer — and Vintage Firearms, LLC, a gun retailer,” reports NPR.
Gendron’s parents were also named as defendants because they “failed to respond to clear red flags that their son was planning to carry out an act of gun violence…Paul and Pamela Gendron’s actions and inactions were inexorably intertwined with their son’s actions.”
Per the lawsuit, “By his own admission, Gendron, a vulnerable teenager, was not racist until he became addicted to social media apps and was lured, unsuspectingly, into a psychological vortex by defective social media applications designed, marketed, and pushed out by social media defendants, and fed a steady stream of racist and white supremacist propaganda and falsehoods by some of those same defendants’ products,” the lawsuit states.
“Addiction to these defective social media products leads users like Gendron into social isolation. Once isolated, Gendron became radicalized by overexposure to fringe, racist ideologies and was primed for the reckless and wanton conduct of the weapons and body armor defendants,” the suit continues.
At a press conference announcing the lawsuit, renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump said, “These social media companies, they knew or should have known that these algorithms will lead people to act in racist, violent manners.”
“The manufacturers of these body armors should have known this type of body armor leads to bloody massacres. And the gun sellers knew or should have known that these guns would lead to gut-wrenching murder. But yet, they all looked the other way,” Crump added.
“Payton Gendron has pled guilty to these murders and is no longer a danger to society…However, the social media platforms that radicalized him, and the companies that armed him, must still be held accountable for their actions. Our goal, on behalf of our clients, is to make this community and our nation safer and prevent other mass shootings,” said John Elmore who is also one of the attorneys representing the victims’ families, in a statement from the Social Media Victims Law Center.
In response, Google, which is owned by Alphabet, released a statement, which said in part, ““We have the deepest sympathies for the victims and families of the horrific attack at Tops grocery store in Buffalo last year. Through the years, YouTube has invested in technology, teams, and policies to identify and remove extremist content. We regularly work with law enforcement, other platforms, and civil society to share intelligence and best practices.”