Wrongful Death Lawsuit Filed Over Buffalo Massacre Targets Social Media

By Andrew Simpson

A wrongful death suit has been filed on behalf of victims’ relatives, survivors and others affected by the 2022 racially-motivated shooting at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo where 10 people were killed, all of them Black, and three people were injured.

The suit was filed in the New York Supreme Court, Erie County, against social media platforms, gunmakers and the shooter’s parents. The complaint focuses on the role of social media, alleging that the shooter, Payton Gendron, was radicalized by the algorithms driving the social media products he used, which fed him increasingly racist, antisemitic, and violence-inducing content.

These “addictive algorithms” maximized his engagement with the platforms and the corresponding advertising revenue to the companies, according to the suit.

Unlike other attempts to hold social media firms liable for shootings or terrorist acts, these plaintiffs say they are not seeking to hold the social media defendants liable as the publisher of any content provided, posted, or created by third parties. Rather, they seek to hold them accountable for their own acts and omissions.

The suit was filed by the advocacy organizations Social Media Victims Law Center and Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence along with three activist attorneys, John V. Elmore, Kristen Elmore-Garcia and Matthew P. Bergman.

Named in the lawsuit are Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook); Snap; Alphabet, Google’s parent company; Discord; Reddit; Amazon.com, which operates the Twitch live streaming service; RMA Armament, an Iowa-based body armor manufacturer; Vintage Firearms, a retail gun store located in Endicott, New York; Mean Arms LLC, a manufacturer in Woodstock, Georgia, that sells the MEAN MA Lock; and Paul and Pamela Gendron, Gendron’s parents.

The complaint includes wrongful death and personal injury counts against all defendants. The counts against the social media platforms include product liability for allegedly “defectively designed” products, negligence, failure to warn, unjust enrichment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Against the firearms firms, the counts are for alleged violations of New York gun laws and negligence; and against the parents, negligent entrustment.

“Gendron was motivated to commit his heinous crime by racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist propaganda fed to him by social media companies,” said Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “These posts led him down a rabbit hole of increasingly radical sites, where he was indoctrinated in white supremacist replacement theory and violent accelerationism.”

Gendron, a white male who was 18 at the time of the attack, drove more than 200 miles to carry out his murders and specifically targeted Black people, according to the complaint. The plaintiffs argue that teenagers are particularly susceptible to social media addiction and online radicalization and that the shooting was the “foreseeable result of social media companies’ intentional decision to maximize user engagement over public safety.”

The filing describes how Gendron chronicled the progress of his plan on Discord in the months leading up to the attack and livestreamed his rampage on Twitch, hoping to inspire future acts of mass violence. The ability to livestream was a major factor in convincing Gendron to go forward with the massacre, the lawsuit says. The livestream live video of the massacre was re-posted on 4chan, kiwifarms.net, Facebook, and Reddit, along with other social media platforms.

Regarding the parents, the suit alleges that prior to the Tops shooting they knew their son had multiple firearms including a semi-automatic rifle; had posted online that he planned to commit “murder suicide;” had undergone a psychiatric examination; and had killed and dismembered a cat. “Given those facts, it was reasonably foreseeable that Payton Gendron posed a significant danger to others and was contemplating an act of gun violence,” the complaint alleges. However, “the parents took no steps to follow up on their son’s violent behavior, remove his access to firearms, take away his body armor, seek a second mental health evaluation, or alert law enforcement or mental health professionals.”