Relatives of those murdered in the Buffalo grocery store shooting one year ago, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against numerous social media companies. Alleging the platforms provided an arena for racist propaganda to fester, the lawsuit is said to have facilitated the 19-year-old killer’s white supremacist radicalization.
The case, filed in State Supreme Court in Buffalo, also lists the shooter’s parents, gun dealer and body armor company as defendants.
“[Payton] Gendron was motivated to commit his heinous crime by racist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist propaganda fed to him by the social media companies whose products he used,” the lawsuit contends, adding that Gendron did not live in a radically divided community and had no history of adverse interactions with Black people, nor was not brought up in a racist family.
The filing comes just two days before the one-year mark since the May 14, 2022, massacre at a Tops store, located in the city’s east side, which is predominantly Black.
Buffalo attorney John Elmore filed the lawsuit on behalf of the family of Katherine “Kat” Massey, Heyward Patterson, and Andre Mackniel, three of the 10 people murdered in the shooting. The Social Media Victims Law Center, a group that works to make social media platforms lawfully responsible for supposed harm inflicted on at-risk users, is in support of the suit.
Amazon, the owner of Twitch, which was used by the killer to livestream the shooting is among the multiple defendants named in the lawsuit. Meta, the parent company of Facebook is also listed along with Discord, Snapchat, Reddit, and Google, which owns Youtube.
4chan, found on the dark web is another defendant, as well as the RMA Armament company and Vintage Firearms company.
Gendron’s livestream of the mass shooting, coined the “murder video” was viewed by more than three million people.
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