Judge rules lawsuit against Snap over fentanyl deaths can move forward

A Los Angeles judge ruled this week that a lawsuit against Snapchat for its role in a series of drug overdoses among young people can proceed.

Last year, family members of a group of children and teens who overdosed on fentanyl sued Snapchat maker Snap, accusing the social media company of facilitating illegal drug trade involving fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. , which is many times more lethal than heroin. Fentanyl is cheap to produce, often sold disguised as other substances, and can be lethal in doses as small as 2 milligrams (the equivalent of about 10 grains of salt).

Parents and family members involved in the lawsuit are represented by the Social Media Victims Legal Center, a firm that specializes in civil cases against social media companies to hold them “legally accountable for the harm they cause vulnerable users.”

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022 and amended last year, said Snap executives “knew that Snapchat’s design and unique features, including disappearing messages… were creating an online safe harbor for the sale of illegal narcotics.”

“Long before the fatal injury prompted this lawsuit, Snap knew that drug dealers were exploiting its product features to sell controlled substances to minors,” said Matthew P. Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Legal Center ) said at the time. .

In a ruling on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Reeve rejected Snap’s efforts to dismiss the case. Snap argued that the case should be dismissed because the social media app is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content.

“California and the Ninth Circuit have clearly ruled that Section 230 immunity applies to communications about illegal drug sales and their sometimes tragic consequences (the specific case here) because the harm came from a third party,” Snap’s attorneys argued last year. argued in the case statement.

Reeve did dismiss four counts against Snap, but rejected the company’s efforts to dismiss more than a dozen other counts, including negligence and wrongful death. He also discussed in depth the relevance of Section 230 to this case, but did not conclude that the law’s legal shield should outright protect Snap:

“Both parties believe the law is clear and the legal path forward is obvious. Not so. The parties’ inability to jointly label Snap’s social media presence and activity reveals the depth of the disagreement: ‘Services’, ‘Apps’, ‘Products’ , “tools”, “interactive processes”, “platforms”, “websites”, “software” or other things.

“What is clear is that the law is unsettled and in a state of development in at least two major ways (1) whether Section 230 (a federal statute) insulates Snap from potential legal liability under the specific allegations alleged, and (2) ) Whether the concept of strict product liability (which generally applies to suppliers of tangible products) has or now should be extended to Snap’s specific alleged conduct. “

The interpretation, potentially controversial, is the latest in a series of cases in which judges have allowed a lawsuit that could have been dismissed on Section 230 grounds to proceed.