Lawsuit could test platform protections
One of the last things that Carson Bride did before taking his own life was look to his phone for help.
The 16-year-old had been receiving anonymous messages on Snapchat for months, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday in California, through a popular Snapchat app called YOLO. The messages included sexual comments and taunts over specific incidents, like the time he'd fainted in biology class at his Portland, Ore., school.
The messages had to be coming from people he knew, but the app's design made it impossible for him to know who was behind it. If he replied to the taunts, YOLO would automatically make the original message public, revealing his humiliation to the world.
His family found him dead on June 23, 2020. The history on his phone showed that he had been searching for "Reveal YOLO Username Online" earlier that morning.
Now Kristin Bride, Carson's mother, is leading a lawsuit against Snap, YOLO and LMK, another anonymous messaging app built for Snapchat that the teenager used before his death. Her complaint alleges that the companies violated consumer protection law by failing to live up to their own terms of service and policies, and that anonymous messaging apps facilitate bullying to such a degree that they should be considered dangerous products.
The suit, filed Monday in federal court in the Northern District of California, seeks to form a class on behalf of the approximately 93 million U.S. users of Snapchat — a number that the company claims includes 90% of all Americans between ages 13 and 24 — along with the 10 million users of YOLO and 1 million users of LMK. Bride's co-plaintiff in the case is the Tyler Clementi Foundation, a nonprofit formed to prevent bullying by the family of Tyler Clementi, who took his own life at age 18 in 2010 after experiencing cyber harassment by a dorm mate at Rutgers University.
Snap, YOLO and LMK did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit seeks to have YOLO and LMK immediately banned from Snap's platform, and seeks damages for the alleged harms and misrepresentations.
"The high school students who anonymously cyberbullied Carson will live with this tragedy for the rest of their lives," said Kristin Bride in a statement provided by Eisenberg & Baum, the firm representing the plaintiffs. "However, it is the executives at Snapchat, Yolo, and LMK irresponsibly putting profits over the mental health of young people who ultimately need to be held accountable."