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Amazon strike reddit8/6/2023 The lawsuit singles out 4chan financial backer Good Smile, a major Japanese toy company that in 2015 invested $2.4 million for a 30 percent share in the site, according to documents WIRED obtained. That community, and similar ones on Discord, helped him prepare for the attack and increase his chances of succeeding. What’s more, Gendron was a frequent user of /k/, the weapons board. While there is no algorithm on the notorious image board, there was a waiting “community of fellow racists urging him to move forward,” the lawsuit alleges. These platforms pointed Gendron to the next step in his radicalization: 4chan. “These products were functioning as designed and intended.” The lawsuit claims that the white supremacist ideology that captured Gendron, particularly the “great replacement theory”-which imagines an international plot to weaken the political power of white people-is a “product of social media.” While it may have been conjured up by a French author and promoted by hardened neo-Nazis, the lawsuit claims that “replacement theory proponents rely heavily on social media-and the tools and features the Social Media Defendants utilize to increase their own engagement-to promote racist ideology to young and impressionable adherents.” “It was the foreseeable consequence of the defendant social media companies’ conscious decision to design, program, and operate platforms and tools that maximize user engagement (and corresponding advertising revenue) at the expense of public safety.” “Gendron’s radicalization on social media was neither a coincidence nor an accident,” the complaint alleges. They point to platforms like Facebook and Snapchat as the first part of that process. The lawsuit essentially takes aim at the full journey that brought Gendron from being a regular American teen to becoming a violent white supremacist-one equipped with the means and intention of massacring as many Black people as possible. No families deserve to be members of this unenviable club, Elmore says. “We can’t bring the victims of this lawsuit back, but we can make sure that no other families have to file this kind of lawsuit,” he says. ![]() In particular, Elmore points to the plea allocution in which Gendron’s lawyers admitted that “the racist hate that motivated this crime was spread through online platforms, and the violence that was made possible was due to the easy access of assault weapons.” (The two California-based companies have yet to respond to the lawsuit.)Īsked about his decision to sue such a wide array of actors-from the social media platforms that, the lawsuit alleges, helped radicalize Gendron to the platforms that helped him stream his crime and the gun manufacturers that enabled him to do so much damage-Elmore says, “that’s where the evidence led us.” The families of those killed in a racially motivated attack on the Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, have filed a similar action against Meta and Alphabet. ![]() This lawsuit, should it go forward, joins a chorus of civil actions attempting to foist liability on social media platforms.
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