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,” in turn, maximized his engagement with the platforms and the corresponding advertising revenue to the companies, according to the suit.
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.
Buffalo Shooting Survivors Weigh Suing Parents, Social Media, Gunmaker
Those 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, which represents users harmed by social media, “These posts led him down a rabbit hole of increasingly radical sites, where he was indoctrinated in white supremacist replacement theory and violent accelerationism.”
The plaintiffs maintain that the shooting was not an accident or coincidence, but rather the “foreseeable result of social media companies’ intentional decision to maximize user engagement over public safety.”
“Gendron was not raised by a racist family, did not live in a radically polarized community, and had no personal history of negative interactions with Black people,” the complaint states. “Rather, Gendron was motivated to commit his heinous crime by racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist propaganda recommended and fed to him by the social media companies whose products he used.”
According to the complaint, Gendron explicitly acknowledged that the racist, antisemitic, and violence- promoting material he encountered on social media caused his radicalization, motivated him to commit racial violence and provided the training, equipment, and expertise to plan and implement the massacre. The complaint quotes these words of Gendron’s attorney: “The racist hate that motivated this crime was spread through on-line platforms…”
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.
Parents’ Role
Regarding the parents, the suit alleges that prior to the Tops shooting, Payton’s parents were aware, among other things about their son, that he 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.”
Massacre Planning
Gendron, a white male who was 18 at the time of the attack, drove more than 200 miles to carry out his murderous rampage that specifically targeted Black people, according to the complaint. The plaintiffs argue that teenagers are particularly susceptible to social media addiction and online radicalization.
The filing describes how Gendron chronicled the progress of his plan on Discord in the months leading up to the attack.
According to the lawsuit, Gendron livestreamed his murderous rampage on Twitch, hoping to inspire future acts of mass violence. The ability to livestream his attack was a major factor in convincing Gendron to go forward with the massacre, the lawsuit says. The livestream in real-time, video of the massacre was subsequently re-posted on other online platforms, including 4chan, kiwifarms.net, Facebook, and Reddit, along with many other social media platforms.
Attorney John V. Elmore, who has served as New York State Assistant Attorney General and as a State Trooper, said that while Gendron has pled guilty to these murders and is no longer a danger to society, the social media platforms that radicalized him, and the companies that armed him, must still be held accountable for their actions.
‘Our goal, on behalf of our clients, is to make this community and our nation safer and prevent other mass shootings,” Elmore said.
Attorney General Report
The complaint comes after the release last October of a report by state Attorney General Letitia James on the role of online platforms in the Buffalo mass shooting. The report concluded that fringe online platforms, like 4chan, radicalized the shooter; livestreaming platforms, like Twitch, were weaponized to publicize and encourage copycat violent attacks; and a lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability of these platforms allowed hateful and extremist views to proliferate online, leading to radicalization and violence.
The attorney general reviewed thousands of pages of documents and social media content to examine how the alleged shooter used online platforms to plan, prepare, and publicize his attack. Her office obtained external and internal content and policies of several of the online platforms used by the shooter.
The city of Buffalo has filed a lawsuit accusing major gun manufacturers of fueling violence through irresponsible marketing and sales practices. Defendants in the lawsuit include Smith & Wesson Brands Inc., Beretta USA Corp, Bushmaster Firearms Industries Inc, Colt’s Manufacturing Co. LLC and Glock Inc. The city is seeking an unspecified money award to combat gun violence.
The attorney general is suing the Georgia-based Mean Arms for selling a gun lock that can be easily removed to attach high-capacity magazines, which are illegal in the state. Gendron carried out his attack with a semiautomatic rifle he purchased legally, but then modified it so he could load it with illegal high- capacity ammunition magazines
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