On January 2, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff denied a majority of Snap. Inc’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed against the company behind social media giant Snapchat. The lawsuit, Neville et al v. Snap, Inc., was filed in October of 2022 by Social Media Victims Law Center and C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, on behalf of families that had children die after taking substances sold by drug sellers operating on Snapchat.
Judge Riff allowed 12 out of 16 allegation counts to move forward, while sustaining Snap, Inc.’s demurrers to four of the counts without leave to amend. According to Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of Social Media Victims Law Center, there will be a status conference regarding the case in the coming weeks, with potential for the case to enter into a discovery period thereafter.
"The judge did not say we win," Bergman told the Daily Press. "The judge simply said we get to play the game, that we get to get past the starting gate."
The plaintiffs second amended complaint, dated July 20, 2023, describes the Snapchat platform as an "open air drug market" and that the platform’s "role in illicit drug sales to teens was the foreseeable result of the designs, structures, and policies Snap chose to implement [to] increase its revenues." Among the design and structural choices alleged by the plaintiffs are Snapchat’s "ineffective age verification and parental controls," its automatic message deletion feature, a "quick add" feature that targets minors and a "stories" feature that facilitates drug seller engagement with minors.
By filing the demurrer papers last year, Snap, Inc. has denied the claims, stating that "it is on the frontlines to stop drug sellers from engaging in this illegal conduct" and has "expended tremendous financial and human capital resources" in these efforts. The demurrer examined the legal sufficiency of the plaintiffs’ allegations, in which the majority of counts were allowed to move forward.
According to the ruling, the company had not yet formally responded to the allegations outside of the demurrer papers at the time of the filing. On Monday, the company released a statement to the Daily Press, restating its commitment to anti-drug selling rhetoric and actions.
"The fentanyl epidemic has taken the lives of too many people and we have deep empathy for families who have suffered unimaginable losses," the statement said. "At Snap, we are working diligently to stop drug dealers from abusing our platform, and deploy technologies to proactively identify and shut down dealers, support law enforcement efforts to help bring dealers to justice, and educate our community and the general public about the dangers of fentanyl."
In the statement, the company also made clear its intentions to continue defending the case.
"While we are committed to advancing our efforts to stop drug dealers from engaging in illegal activity on Snapchat, we believe the plantiffs’ allegations are both legally and factually flawed and will continue to defend that position in court," the company noted.
Snap Inc.’s motion stated that all alleged counts "are based on content created and exchanged by third parties," and therefore should be barred under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The statute states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," with the other "information content provider" in this case being drug sellers on Snapchat.
The company’s arguments related to Section 230 were that because the plaintiffs’ harm arose from third-party interactions, Snap is immunized from any liability from those harms. Furthermore, the company took the position that it was not acting as a publisher in the traditional sense, and that Snapchat was not a product, but rather a service.
To those arguments, the court agreed that it cannot be liable as a publisher of a third-party drug sellers’ Snapchat content, but that the allegations do not "impose liability upon Snap for publishing or failing to moderate" the content, rather independent conduct that goes beyond "incidental editorial functions" under Section 230 immunity.
"Our approach was different, we approached it from the standpoint of product liability," Bergman said. "Not attacking the content, but rather the designs of the platform. Judge Riff said that we have stated a claim, he hasn’t said we are right or wrong … [but] we can go forward on that claim in the future."
Bergman further argued that under California law, if it is "foreseeable" that an individual can be harmed by a third party, an entity such as Snap, Inc. can be held liable in some cases.
"Think of a situation where you have a parking garage with inadequate lighting and a person is assaulted in the middle of the night by a person in that parking garage, and the courts have said [the parking garage has] a duty to exercise reasonable care to adequately light [the] facility," Bergman said.
The four counts in which Snap, Inc.’s demurrals were sustained were counts related to "tortious interference with parental rights," "public nuisance," "aiding and abetting" and "loss of consortium and society." The remainder of counts, ranging from strict product liability and negligence to fraudulent misrepresentation, will be allowed to move forward, and Bergman noted that the parents were "overjoyed" by the news.
"These parents are the most inspiring clients I have represented in 30 years … they are singularly focused on accountability," Bergman said. "They have not said a word, ever, about money. They have simply talked about suffering the worst loss that anybody can imagine, that being the loss of a child, and their singular motivation is preventing other families from experiencing the same loss."
