(FeaturedNews.com) – The families of the victims in the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting that occurred last year are suing over half a dozen Big Tech companies, accusing them of having provided the shooter with a platform to engage with these racist and violent views prior to the shooting.
Diona Patterson, Barbara Mapps, and Shawanda Rogers, who lost loved ones in the shooting, and survivor Latisha Rogers filed the lawsuit in New York Supreme Court in Erie County on Friday, naming in the lawsuit, Meta, Snap, Inc., Discord, Amazon, which owns Twitch, Reddit, Google, 4chan which is a dark web messaging site, the body armor company RMA Armament, the firearm company Vintage Firearms and the shooter’s parents.
Last May, Payton Gendron, a white teenager, opened fire at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo. The mass shooting led to 10 Black people dying and three others being injured. Gendron pleaded guilty in November to charges of murder, murder as a hate crime, and hate-motivated domestic terrorism following his admission that he had targeted his victims because of their race. He has been sentenced to life in prison.
In the lawsuit, it is noted that Gendron’s family was not racist and that his community was not radically polarized, but that he had been motivated to commit this hate crime because of his exposure to racist content on these platforms. It is stated that Gendron himself had admitted to seeing racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist “propaganda” on these platforms which motivated him to carry out the mass shooting. Additionally, it was these platforms that provided Gendron with the information, training, and equipment in order to able to complete his planned attack.
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