Their kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing::Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers
The night he died, Alexander had told his parents that he had been taking Oxycontin he got online, and that he wanted help. Neville and her husband immediately called a rehab facility and made plans to take him there the following day, but didn’t think to take the pills away.
Clearly Snapchats fault
“My baby keeps playing with the knife, instead of taking away the knife I’ll schedule some behaviour classes”
The parents next day finding the baby stabbed itself:
It’s obviously the knife manufacturer, and whatever retailer that sold the knife’s fault!
Here’s an idea: parent your fuckin kids better.
Wow inflation has even hit the drug market. X and acid has doubled since the last time I did anything. Shrooms seemed to stay the same though
Probably just the dudes on snapchat taxing. If you know the right people you can get it for cheaper
Lmao, what? They might as well sue phone manufacturers for giving kids access to internet and app stores where they can install apps that enables drug dealers to reach kids or whatever
Except for
Even after she created her own account and found her son’s dealer posting images with hundreds of pills, Mendoza’s reports to the help center went unanswered, and it took eight months for them to flag his account. “It was really disheartening,” she said.
And
Other problematic features include notifying individuals when another person screenshots their post, the ability to geolocate fellow users and algorithms that suggest new connections based on demographics.
“I will ask snapchat to stop doing bad things, but I will not delete their app from my kids smartphone. It’s their responsibility, not mine”
Wait, so the parent knew about this issue for over eight months and did nothing to actually get their kid help?
Who said they didn’t?
The fact that they still allowed their kid to have access to the drug dealing app/device that has the drug dealing app on it.
Or they removed it and then the kid put it back. Yes, they might have been able to take the device away entirely but that’s not really effective, and the strong parental controls are only available for kids up to 13 (at least on Android).
That doesn’t absolve Google or Apple for facilitating the download of the app where drug dealers frolic.
Perhaps SnapChat files a counter suit on the parents for buying their kid a smartphone, paying for service, and not putting parental controls on the device to keep them from using apps that they don’t want their kid accessing
Google parental controls shut down automatically after a certain age.
Not much of a counter suit. It’s legal to buy your kid a smartphone and it’s legal to not put parental controls on it.
Their kids made a choice and it ended badly. We are all responsible for the actions we choose to take.
They should also sue whoever invented language because the kids used language to communicate with the drug dealers.
Another sad example of the harm caused by the war on drugs.
Try watching your kids and stop letting them go blindly on the internet…
One of the victims described was only a few weeks away from graduating from university.
You gotta find these people in the real world. People like that aren’t gonna be on lemmy or even know about it. Those types can’t get past the settings menu let alone understand FOSS.
Giving customers deadly drugs they didn’t ask to buy seems like an absolutely shit business plan. How do you get repeat business from dead people?
Usually the people selling these to individuals don’t know what it actually contains. They just buy it from higher up in the chain assuming it is what they say it is.
The people who do make these pills will add fentanyl for multiple reasons but none of those reasons are to kill the user. It’s because fentanyl is cheap to make and a lot more powerful. You can smuggle a much smaller physical amount of fentanyl than something like heroin. Because of that, they’ll smuggle less of another drug and make up for the difference by adding fentanyl. The intention is never to add too much of it but they make careless mistakes and end up with some pills containing a lethal amount.
There’s no shortage of people with enough to despair to turn to drugs lately.
