Elmore says the goal is to force reform.
“We can’t bring back the victims of this lawsuit, but we can make sure that other families don’t have to go through this kind of lawsuit,” he says. No family deserves to be a member of this unenviable club, says Elmore.
The lawsuit essentially focuses on the full journey that took Gendron from an ordinary American teenager to a violent white supremacist – one equipped with the means and intent to slaughter as many black people as possible. They point to platforms like Facebook and Snapchat as the first part of that process.
“Gendron’s radicalization on social media was neither a coincidence nor an accident,” the indictment states. “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 associated ad revenue) at the expense of public safety.”
The lawsuit alleges that the white supremacist ideology that captured Gendron, specifically the “grand replacement theory” — which proposes an international plot to weaken white people’s political power — is a “product of social media.” While it may have been created by a French author and promoted by hardened neo-Nazis, the lawsuit alleges that “proponents of the replacement theory rely heavily on social media — and the tools and features social media defendants use to boost their own engagement — to promote racist ideology to young and impressionable supporters.”
Exposure to this kind of hate propaganda as a teenager, mixed with the addictive nature of social media, fundamentally changed Grendron’s brain chemistry, Elmore argues in his files.
Social media platforms maximized user engagement “not by showing them content they request or want to see, but by showing them and otherwise recommending content they can’t look away from,” the complaint continues. “Taking full advantage of the incomplete development of Gendron’s frontal lobe, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat maintained his product engagement by targeting him with increasingly extreme and violent content and connections that, based on information and belief, promoted racism, anti-Semitism and gun violence. ”
This is not a bug, Elmore argues. “These products functioned as designed and intended.”
These platforms pointed Gendron to the next step in his radicalization: 4chan.
While there’s no algorithm on the infamous image board, there was a waiting “community of fellow racists urging him to move on,” the lawsuit alleges. In addition, Gendron was a frequent user of /k/, the weapon board. That community, and others like it on Discord, helped prepare him for the attack and increase his chances of success.
The lawsuit finds 4chan financier Good Smile, a major Japanese toy company that invested $2.4 million in 2015 for a 30 percent stake in the site, according to documents obtained by WIRED. Referring to reporting from WIRED and a lawsuit filed by former employees of the company, the families claim that Good Smile’s role in 4chan “is not that of a passive investor, but is actively involved in running the social media site .”
In an April statement, Good Smile denied WIRED’s reporting, stressing, “We have no partnership with 4chan, have never had any influence over the management and/or control of 4chan.” However, in the same statement, Good Smile also says, “We have severed any limited relationship we previously had with 4chan in June 2022. We have not had any relationship with 4chan since then.” The company has cited “confidentiality obligations” preventing it from commenting on the matter and has ignored multiple requests for comment.
