Several major tech companies were hit with a massive wrongful death lawsuit over last year’s racist grocery store massacre in Buffalo, New York, for allegedly feeding the convicted shooter “racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist propaganda.”
The 144-page suit from survivor Latisha Rogers and several victims’ families was filed in New York state court on Friday. The complaint names Facebook parent company Meta, Twitch owner Amazon, Google parent Alphabet ― which owns YouTube ― and Snapchat owner Snap, as well as Discord, Reddit and hate-filled website 4Chan. Also named are a body armor manufacturer, a firearms store, a gun accessories manufacturer and the shooter’s parents.
The shooter, Payton Gendron, killed 10 Black people and wounded three others at a Tops grocery store in May of last year. He pleaded guilty to charges including domestic terrorism motivated by hate in November, and was sentenced to life without parole in February.
Gendron notably penned a racist manifesto prior to the shooting in which he touted the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which had been pushed into the mainstream by then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, and said he chose the store for the shooting because it was in a predominantly Black community.
The families’ suit comes a day after New York Attorney General Letitia James separately sued the gun accessories manufacturer, Mean Arms, for its sale to the shooter of a magazine with an “easily” removable lock that was used in the crime, according to a press release.
Friday’s filing arrives two days before the one-year anniversary of the massacre.
“Gendron’s radicalization on social media was neither a coincidence nor an accident; it was the foreseeable consequence of the defendant social media companies’ conscious decision to design, program, and operate platforms and tools that maximize user engagement (and corresponding advertising revenue) at the expense of public safety,” the families’ suit reads.
Photo by John Normile/Getty Images
The lawsuit argues that Gendron wasn’t raised by a racist family and didn’t live in a “radically polarized community,” but that he was exposed to “racist, antisemitic and violence-promoting material” that “caused his radicalization [and] motivated him to commit racial violence.”
“The defendant social media companies drew Gendron down a rabbit hole of
increasingly racist and antisemitic sites, indoctrinating him in white supremacist replacement theory and violent accelerationism,” the lawsuit states.
Buffalo civil attorney John Elmore filed the complaint on behalf of three victims’ families along with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the Social Media Victims Law Center.
Barbara Massey Mapps, sister of Buffalo shooting victim Katherine “Kat” Massey, told ABC News that she hopes “something will come out of” the lawsuit.
“Every day or every few days, all you hear about is a mass shooting,” Mapps told ABC. “You’ve got to start somewhere, in order for them to get the message. These big companies only know one thing, money. So, you’ve got to hurt them. How many people do you want to see dead?”