Suing Snapchat won't fix the environment that led to their daughter desiring drugs, sadly.
Desiring drugs isn't what killed her any more than snapchat did. She wanted drugs that were comparatively safe, and instead she got poison.
Why was somebody selling poison? Because buying drugs is illegal, and so consumer protection rules don't apply.
The war on drugs makes drugs more dangerous. Let her go to the drug store and buy some regular-ass methylphenidate over the counter if she wants a stimulant. The pharmacist ain't going to screw up and give her fent.
I think it's a bit easy to blame the environment when almost every kid is going to test that kind of thing at some point in their teens. Watching your children AND regulating snapchat surely can coexist
when almost every kid is going to test that kind of thing at some point in their teens.
How did you come to this conclusion?
Being around teenagers in the last decade pretty much leads to this conclusion.
The number of people I knew who didn’t do some kind of drugs in high school (grad 2017) was lower than the number that did, and I went to the known “upper middle class white people” school.
This day and age has led to teens increasingly seek escapism and other, less healthy coping mechanisms
I work in K12. The amount of kids who are trying drugs at a younger age is massively higher than when I was in high school 20 years ago.
Yep. It’s crazy and not in a good way. 20 years ago the edgy kids smoked pot and not much worse. Now there’s kids literally doing cocaine in bathrooms of high schools. Pot is not only normalized, it’s almost encouraged among teenagers now.
I’m a pothead to an extreme degree and I keep telling kids to not be like me.
I had kids doing cocaine in our high school bathrooms 25 years ago, which is why anecdotes are unreliable for sense-making.
Exactly, the 1980s existed and some of us were alive then. I was too young to see coke in high school as I started in 1989 but older siblings absolutely did.
Um, there's a whole lot to escape from, even if their home life is functional.
We don't get to totally neglect kids and parenting as a society, except to funnel them towards becoming an interchangeable, disposable laborer / soldier in some machine working towards a billionaire vanity project or into prison where their options are worse, and then not expect them to want to escape.
If a teen is seeking out drug sales on Snapchat, that's a symptom that something is amiss, whether or not the platform is being misused.
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!
It sucks their kids died but it is more their fault than Snapchat.
You can't blame the postman for delivering weed, it is just another package to them. And by the same token if someone seeks out drugs that's on them.
Legalise drugs.
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"
Another sad example of the harm caused by the war on drugs.
I think I saw somebody selling drugs in a park next to a playground. We should forbid parks with playgrounds because they make it easy to sell drugs to kids.
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.
Somebody needs to teach kids about actual drug safety. Abstinence from drugs is a shitty program that doesn't work and often, the speakers just lie. Opipids are horrible enough that you don't have to make up lies about them. When kids find out they lied about weed, they start to wonder what else they were lied to about. I can understand 14 year olds being dumb, but people in their 20s should know better than to be buying opioids on Snapchat and Telegram.
Also, I don't see a way how Snapchat can possibly regulate this. Just like with Craigslist, criminals will use emoji and code words to sell drugs and get through language filters.
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
I am conflicted on this one. On one hand, yeah they’re just a platform, and realistically these kids would just go to another messaging service instead, but it also feels like they’re asleep at the wheel when it comes to investigating user reports of abuse.
It’s sort of an all social media thing, because I’ve reported posts selling drugs on FB marketplace too and they ignored them after review.
They quote one of the families in the article reporting a drug dealers account and Snapchat taking no action for months. I’d be willing to bet moderation is an afterthought and likely understaffed for the sheer volume of content on the app.
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.
I actually was in a University project once about designing centrifuges in a way to properly mix two powders for pharmaceutical purposes. This is absolutely non-trivial and apparently this used to be done by ear by experts in the field.
My work was about creating a computer simulation to test new designs.
I can totally see this going wrong in a secret back alley lab.
Shut down and reopen as some other shady, fly-by-night internet business?
Here's an idea: parent your fuckin kids better.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
They found screenshots of what looked like a menu of narcotics, and conversations with a drug dealer showing Brooke had purchased what she believed to be Roxicet, a prescription medication containing acetaminophen and oxycodone typically prescribed for pain relief.
The suit claims Snapchat’s features facilitate practices like drug sales by connecting dealers to young customers while promising safety from legal repercussions through anonymity.
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.
Perla Mendoza, a parent in the suit, found that Snap did little to prevent illegal drug sales in the weeks and months after the death of her son, Daniel (Elijah) Figueroa, who bought fentanyl-laced pills from a dealer on Snapchat.
Ternan, who did not join the suit, goes on to explain that losing his son – an energetic and fun-loving young man who was weeks away from graduating from UC Santa Cruz – has forced himself to come to terms with the factors that came together to cause Charlie’s death.
While Mendoza works to spread awareness of the risks of fentanyl to Spanish-speaking families, Neville travels to schools to share Alexander’s story and hosts monthly online meetings that empower young people to do peer-to-peer youth outreach.
The original article contains 1,269 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What a waste of time.
They should also sue whoever invented language because the kids used language to communicate with the drug dealers.
Their kids made a choice and it ended badly. We are all responsible for the actions we choose to take.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
