A new lawsuit filed against major online media giants by two of the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church mass shooting survivors.
The lawsuit, filed against Meta and Google, claims the platforms influenced and radicalized the man convicted of the killings.
The killer, Dylan Roof, was convicted of killing nine people in June of 2015 during a bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston.
The lawsuit was filed by two of the survivors of the shooting, Felicia Sanders and her unnamed granddaughter, who pretended to be dead in order to avoid the shooter’s attention.
It alleges Roof was radicalized by the content on platforms like YouTube and Facebook and that it served as the “initial gateway to hate that YouTube and Facebook further cultivated through shared personal data that captured his information and web history,” and that their content algorithms pushed content that confirmed his biases.
A similar lawsuit was filed late last year by the daughter and widow of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people killed in the 2015 shooting.
