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A Los Angeles court allowed a Snapchat lawsuit concerning youth drug overdoses this week.
Last year, family members of toddlers and teenagers who overdosed on fentanyl sued Snapchat for aiding illicit drug sales. Fentanyl, which is cheap to make and marketed under several names, is fatal in very small amounts.
The Social Media Victims Law Center represents the parents and family members in the lawsuit to hold social media firms “legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users.”
The case, filed in 2022 and updated this year, claims Snap officials knew Snapchat’s design and functionalities, such as vanishing messages, created an online drug market.
“Long before the fatal injuries giving rise to this lawsuit, Snap knew that its product features were being used by drug dealers to sell controlled substances to minors,” Social Media Victims Law Center founder Matthew P. Bergman stated.
Snapchat said that it is “working diligently” with law authorities to combat drug sales on its platform. We are dedicated to stopping drug dealers from engaging in illicit activities on Snapchat, but we think the plaintiffs’ assertions are both legally and factually faulty and will defend that position in court, a Snapchat official told Eltrys.
Judge Lawrence Riff of the Los Angeles Superior Court denied Snap’s motion to dismiss on Tuesday. Snapchat contended that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields web platforms from responsibility for user-generated content, thus the lawsuit should be dismissed.
In their brief last year, Snap’s lawyers argued that Section 230 immunity applies to communications about illegal drug sales and their sometimes tragic consequences—the exact circumstances here—because the harm flows from third-party content exchanged on the defendant’s social media platform.
Riff dismissed four Snap allegations but overturned the company’s efforts to dismiss more than 10 others, including negligence and wrongful death. He also examined Section 230’s applicability to the issue but did not decide that Snap should be protected by the law.
Both parties say the law and legal path are clear. Not so. The parties’ failure to agree on Snap’s social media label—“service,” “app,” “product,” “tool,” “interactive course of conduct,” “platform,” “website,” “software”—shows their disagreement.
The law is unclear in at least two areas: (1) whether “section 230” (a federal statute) immunizes Snap from legal liability under the specific allegations asserted, and (2) whether strict product liability, usually applicable to suppliers of tangible products, already does or should extend to Snap’s alleged conduct.
A court has authorized a lawsuit that might be dismissed under Section 230 in a number of recent cases, including this one, which is sure to be contentious.
