A new civil lawsuit filed Wednesday by families of the Buffalo Tops mass shooting victims targets a number of social media companies, gun retailers, a body armor manufacturer and the mass shooter’s parents. Here, a group prays at the site of a memorial for the victims of the Buffalo supermarket shooting outside the Tops Friendly Market on Saturday, May 21, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y.
Joshua Bessex/AP
The attorneys and families of the Buffalo Tops supermarket shooting victims filed a new civil lawsuit Wednesday against several social media platforms, gun retailers, and the shooter’s parents for their roles in the shooting.
The 176-page lawsuit filed in the New York Supreme Court argues that several corporations in addition to the shooter’s parents played a role in May 2022 deadly mass shooting that killed 10 Black people and injured three others.
Nearly a dozen companies were mentioned in the lawsuit, including Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Amazon (which owns Twitch), Google, YouTube, Discord and 4Chan. Other companies named in the lawsuit as defendants include RMA Armament — a body-armor manufacturer — and Vintage Firearms, LLC, a gun retailer.
The lawsuit also argues that the gunman, now 20-year-old Payton Gendron was radicalized by these social media platforms, which directly lead to him carrying out the deadly shooting.
“By his own admission, Gendron, a vulnerable teenager, was not racist until he became addicted to social media apps and was lured, unsuspectingly, into a psychological vortex by defective social media applications designed, marketed, and pushed out by social media defendants, and fed a steady…
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