Teen Who Was Sexually Exploited on Snapchat Sues Tech Giants
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
A teenage girl has sued social media giant Snap after she was coerced into sending nude photos of herself through its Snapchat app, claiming that the company has failed to protect minors like her from child sexual exploitation.
The lawsuit, first reported by the Washington Post, accuses Santa Monica-based Snap of fostering a “safe haven for child sexual abuse”—contending that Snapchat’s disappearing messages empower sexual predators to engage in criminal behavior with less fear of being caught. At the same time, Snap’s systems for detecting sexually exploitive content are “ineffective,” according to the complaint filed this week in federal court in Southern California.
The proposed class action—which seeks to represent all U.S. Snapchat users who were teens over the last decade and appeared in photos and videos on the app—also names Apple and Google as defendants. That’s because the tech giants’ app stores allegedly hosted third-party apps that allowed predators to distribute child pornography—including images of the teen girl, identified in the lawsuit as “L.W.,” who is suing the tech giants. The suit seeks at least $5 million in damages and aims to force the companies to invest more into protecting teens from sexual exploitation.
“By engaging in unfair, deceptive business practices… and by enabling sexual predators to perpetrate crimes against minor children while financially benefitting from the same, Snap has caused severe harm to Plaintiff L.W. and putative Class members,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit is the latest attempt to hold social media giants like Snap accountable for the harm that their platforms can inflict on children. California legislators are considering a bill that would let parents sue social media companies for addicting their children to those companies’ apps. State attorneys general, meanwhile, have urged Snap and Culver City-based TikTok to strengthen their parental controls and have launched multiple investigations into their operations, including over content involving human trafficking.
In a statement to dot.LA, Snap spokesperson Katie Derkits said the company wouldn’t comment on active litigation, but said the sexual exploitation of L.W. was “tragic and we are glad the perpetrator has been caught and convicted.” (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our community,” Derkits said. “We employ the latest technologies and develop our own tools to help us find and remove content that exploits or abuses minors. We will continue to do all that we can to protect minors on our platform.”
L.W.’s lawsuit contends that Snap’s systems to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) are ineffective at preventing the sexual grooming of teens. It claims that while Snap’s software identifies previously reported images and videos that match content in a database of known CSAM, new illegal content produced or distributed on Snap often fails to match anything in the existing database.
“Snap’s enforcement relies upon reports from individual users who have been harmed, an inherently reactive approach that waits until a child is harmed and places the burden on the child to voluntarily report their own abuse,” according to the complaint.
According to the Post, Snap representatives have argued that more aggressive scanning of personal messages to take down CSAM could harm user privacy and trust on the platform.
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
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