L4sBotTheir kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing
FiveMacsTry watching your kids and stop letting them go blindly on the internet…
radixOne 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.
Suing Snapchat won’t fix the environment that led to their daughter desiring drugs, sadly.
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
PxtlDesiring 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.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆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.
gregorumShut down and reopen as some other shady, fly-by-night internet business?
Besides the issues caused by dealers adding adulterants and impacting the purity of drugs that way, because illicit drugs aren’t professionally tested and produced in less than optimal conditions it’s possible that drug labs will produce at varying purity levels or make something completely different to what they intended, even if they’ve been successful hundreds of times before.
From Wikipedia: “In 1976, a 23-year-old graduate student in chemistry named Barry Kidston was searching for a way to make a legal recreational drug… Kidston successfully synthesized and used desmethylprodine for several months, after which he suddenly came down with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and was hospitalized. Physicians were perplexed, since Parkinson’s disease would be a great rarity in someone so young, but L-dopa, the standard drug for Parkinson’s, relieved his symptoms. L-dopa is a precursor for dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose lack produces Parkinson’s symptoms. It was later found that his development of Parkinson’s was due to a common impurity in the synthesis of MPPP called MPTP (1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine), a neurotoxin that specifically targets dopamine producing neurons.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmethylprodine
MYCOOLNEJMLmao, 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
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.
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.
Their kids made a choice and it ended badly. We are all responsible for the actions we choose to take.
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.
Another sad example of the harm caused by the war on drugs.
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.
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!
EdgarallenpwnWow 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
Here’s an idea: parent your fuckin kids better.
harkThey should also sue whoever invented language because the kids used language to communicate with the drug dealers.