Victims’ Families Sue Social Media Companies Over Buffalo Massacre

Months after a white supremacist shooter gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo Tops supermarket, survivor Latisha Rogers and three victims’ families hit several tech giants with a wrongful death lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that the companies fueled the gunman, Payton Gendron, 19, with “racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist propaganda.” Filed in the State Supreme Court in Buffalo, the lawsuit calls out Facebook, Amazon’s Twitch, Google’s YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, Reddit, and the infamous 4Chan for taking the killer “down a rabbit hole of increasingly radical sites and indoctrinating him with white supremacist replacement theory and violent accelerationism,” attorney Matthew Bergman said in a statement. The filing claims Gendron did not grow up with a racist family or in a “radically polarizing community,” but problematic social media content prompted him to carry out racial violence. Gendron livestreamed the first two minutes of the racist massacre on Twitch before it was removed, and copies of the “murder video” spread widely unchecked across the social media platforms. Other defendants named in the lawsuit include a gun dealer, body armor manufacturer, and Gendron’s parents.