A Los Angeles judge ruled this week that a lawsuit accusing Snapchat of causing a series of teen drug overdoses can proceed. Last year, a group of family members involved in children and teens who overdosed on fentanyl sued Snapchat maker Snap, accusing the social media company of facilitating illegal drug trade involving fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid many times more deadly than heroin. Fentanyl is cheap to produce, often sold disguised as other substances, and can be lethal even in tiny doses.
Parents and family members involved in the lawsuit are represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a firm that specializes in civil cases against social media companies with the aim of holding them "legally accountable for the harm they cause to vulnerable users."
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022 and amended last year, accuses Snap executives of "knowing that Snapchat's design and unique features, including disappearing messages... were creating an online safe haven for the sale of illegal narcotics."
Matthew P. Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said at the time: "Long before the fatal injury that gave rise to this lawsuit, Snap knew that its product features were being used by drug traffickers to sell controlled substances to minors."
Snapchat pushed back, noting that it is "working diligently" to coordinate with law enforcement to address drug trafficking on the platform. "While we are committed to advancing our efforts to stop drug traffickers from engaging in illegal activity on Snapchat, we believe the plaintiffs' allegations are legally and factually flawed, and we will continue to defend this position in court," a representative for Snapchat said. "
In a ruling on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff rejected Snap's effort to drop the lawsuit. Snap had argued that the case should be dismissed on the grounds that social media apps are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
"The State of California and the Ninth Circuit have clearly held that Section 230 immunity applies to communications about illegal drug sales and their sometimes tragic consequences—as was the case here—because the harm arises from content exchanged by third parties on defendants' social media platforms," Snap's attorneys argued in a defense brief last year.
Reeve dismissed four claims against Snap but rejected the company's request to dismiss more than a dozen other claims, including negligence and wrongful death. He also addressed the relevance of Section 230 to this case, but did not conclude that the law's legal protections should fully protect Snap:
"Both parties believed the law was clear and the legal path was obvious. It was not. The depth of the disagreement was exposed by the parties' inability to jointly label Snap's social media presence and activities: 'service,' 'app,' 'product,' 'tool,' 'interaction process,' 'platform,' 'website,' 'software,' or otherwise."
What is clear is that the law is unsettled and evolving in at least two major areas: (1) whether Section 230 (a federal statute) insulates Snap from potential legal liability under the specific allegations alleged; and (2) whether the concepts of strict product liability that generally apply to suppliers of tangible products have, or now should, extend to Snap's specific alleged conduct. "
The interpretation is likely to be controversial and is the latest in a series of cases in which judges have allowed lawsuits that might have been dismissed under Section 230 to proceed.