‘Gone in a Snap,’ parents protest the social media company they view as complicit in their children’s deaths
This Friday marked the fourth time that Amy Neville has marched to Snapchat’s Santa Monica headquarters since her 14-year-old son, Alexander, died in 2020 after taking a counterfeit pill containing fentanyl he purchased via the social media app.
Other parents who walked alongside Neville this week as part of the ‘Gone in a Snap’ demonstration share similar stories and a common goal: to hold Snap Inc. accountable for what they view as complicity in their children’s deaths and to advocate for more safety measures and controls on the platform.
Glen Draper, an attorney for the Social Media Victims Law Center representing over 80 families who lost children to pills containing fentanyl purchased on Snapchat in claims against the company, said that the platform’s unique features make it especially attractive to drug dealers.
“The feature that everybody’s most familiar with, of course, is the disappearing messages, but there are other features besides that, that drug dealers use on Snapchat to contact kids and offer them drugs,” he said, “They have a connection feature that lets dealers contact kids that they don’t know…they have a feature called Snap Map that allows drug dealers to locate kids to confirm their identity, that they’re not police, and offer drug menus to people who are in a specific area.”
Local Santa Monica parents Sam Chapman and Laura Berman lost their 16-year-old son, Sammy, in 2020 to a fentanyl-laced pill he thought was Xanax which he obtained through Snapchat and had delivered to their house “like a pizza” while they were asleep.
