The five directors of some of the most influential social media companies on the planet – Meta, X, TikTok, Discord and Snap – will appear before the US Senate this Wednesday.
Some parents will also be present at the hearing, such as Jaime Puerta, who along with sixty others are specifically suing Snap Inc., the company that created the instant messaging social network Snapchat, for the deaths of their children as a result of fentanyl consumption. .
Puerta, 61, was born in Medellín, Colombia, but has lived in the United States his entire life and is a Marine Corps veteran who has developed his own business providing translation services in California hospitals.
Something that brings sighs and tears to him is talking about his son Daniel Puerta-Johnson, who died at the age of 16 after ingesting a pill that he thought contained oxycodone, an opioid painkiller, but in reality it was mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can become 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in Spanish).
Puerta says that, from time to time, he relives the morning of March 30, 2020 when, seeing that Daniel did not come out of his room, he opened the door and found him unconscious.
Illicitly manufactured fentanyl can be fatal within minutes because it slows the rate and depth of breathing, so the lungs fill with fluid and cannot oxygenate the blood.
A symptom of fentanyl poisoning is foamy liquid around the nose and mouth, something Puerta noticed when he saw his son.
Immediately, his reflexes from years of intense training with the Marines kicked in and he quickly contacted 911 and the paramedics were able to "get Daniel's heartbeat back."
But that was not enough.
Daniel was declared brain dead at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and days later, Puerta and Daniel's mother, Denise Johnson, made the anguishing decision to remove their son's life support.
"My child died peacefully, with his mother stroking his beautiful blonde hair while I held his hand," explains Puerta, through tears.
Daniel Puerta-Johnson died at age 16 after taking a pill he thought was oxycodone: it was laced with fentanyl.Social Media Victims Law Center
Daniel was very charismatic and learned to program very quickly because he wanted to study systems engineering because he loved video games.
Puerta remembers that he liked to get lost in the virtual worlds where he lived great adventures, but he admits that everything began to change between the ages of 11 and 12, when he was given his first smartphone.
"Shortly after, he opened a Snapchat account and, with the whole pandemic problem, he became more self-absorbed and used that social network a lot. There he was bombarded with notifications at all hours," he explains.
"According to the investigation, we realized that my son had acquired that pill through the social network Snapchat. He contacted the drug dealer three blocks from our house where he bought the pill, brought it here and that night or very early In the morning, he consumed half of that pill and it took his life," says Puerta, who shows his hands when he remembers that he was the one who found, on the bedroom dresser, half of the pill that his son ingested.
["It is us who die": the pandemic triggers opioid overdoses and Latinos are the most vulnerable]
In the United States, drug overdoses killed more than 112,000 people between May 2022 and May 2023, according to the CDC.
The vast majority of those who died were adults.
But overdoses are killing young Americans in record numbers: The monthly total rose from 31 in July 2019 to 87 in May 2021, the period with the most recent data.
"I survived the drug war in Colombia to come to the United States and my son ends up being a drug victim."
Jaime Puerta, Victims of Illicit Drug Use Foundation
With bitterness, Puerta remembers that he experienced the horror of the violence unleashed by drug trafficker Pablo Escobar in Medellín, which was one of the reasons for his family to emigrate.
"I survived the drug war in Colombia to come to the United States and my son ends up being a drug victim, that's crazy. But he's not the only one, there have been thousands of thousands of young people who are dying from this ", he asserts.
"Illegal organizations take advantage of Snapchat"
In October 2022, the families of more than 60 young people who died from fentanyl overdoses decided to sue Snap Inc. The lawsuit was filed by Social Media Victims Law Center, a private law firm that focuses on holding networking companies accountable. for causing harm to minors, and alleges that SNAP allows people to sell illicit drugs on its platform, causing deaths.
"This lawsuit is important because opioid deaths are the number one killer of youth ages 18 and under in the United States and across North America. What we are seeing is that a significant number of these deaths, virtually all of them, involve synthetic opiates in the form of fentanyl and many sales of fentanyl are made through Snapchat, the open-air drug market preferred by drug traffickers," Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, explains in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
The lawsuit alleges
negligence, defective product, misrepresentation and wrongful death.
The families also claim that Snapchat's disappearing messages feature can perpetuate illegal behavior by allowing users to hide their actions, making it difficult for law enforcement to search for evidence of illegal activity.
Parents involved in the legal process say their children died after ingesting drugs they did not know contained fentanyl.
"90% of all the families I have spoken to have told me that the vast majority of their children acquired drugs through Snapchat. Drug dealers really like this social application because all conversations between two people disappear. Plus , there is an option in which the algorithm makes suggestions to add up to 200 people, without really knowing them, and that is a danger for young people because there may be pedophiles, drug traffickers, countless nefarious people," explains Puerta.
Drug dealers really like this social app
jaime door
Although Snap Inc. used legal remedies at its disposal to have the lawsuit dismissed, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence P. Riff ruled on January 2 of this year that the parents' lawsuit could move forward and proceed to judgment.
Snapchat messages from drug dealers included in Social Media Victims Law Center lawsuit.
Social Media Victims Law Center
"This lawsuit caused an earthquake in the annals of justice in the United States. Because by ruling that the case can proceed it is a wake-up call for all other social applications like TikTok, Twitter and Meta. They have responsibility for the content, they "They cannot simply publish whatever they want without any type of consequence. We have lost almost a generation of boys and girls to this poison of fentanyl," says Puerta.
The parents are seeking injunctive relief requiring Snap to correct the unsafe design features and general damages of an undetermined amount.
The company defends itself
Noticias Telemundo contacted Snap Inc. to find out its opinion on the lawsuit and the accusations from the relatives of young people who have lost their lives due to drugs acquired through Snapchat.
The company responded with an emailed statement, saying: “The fentanyl epidemic has claimed the lives of too many people, and we have deep empathy for the families who have suffered unimaginable losses.
At Snap
, we are working diligently to prevent drug traffickers from abusing our platform
, and deploy technologies to proactively identify and sanction traffickers, support law enforcement efforts to help bring traffickers to justice, and educate our community and the general public about the dangers of fentanyl.”
[Fentanyl was stored on top of play mats at Bronx daycare where child died, authorities say]
However, the company also emphasizes that, while it is committed to efforts to stop drug dealers and illegal activities on Snapchat,
“we believe the plaintiffs' allegations are legally and factually flawed and will continue to defend that position in court.” ”.
Relatives interviewed by Noticias Telemundo expressed that they want Snapchat's algorithm to be changed, asking that the company allow the use of child surveillance software and better protections for children.
"What we are looking for is for the rules to change, for access to be toughened, for people not to be able to offer any type of illegal product on social networks. Illegal organizations take advantage of Snapchat precisely because of its type of encrypted messages that are deleted every time. certain time," explained Diana Trujillo Gaviria, who is also participating in the lawsuit.
Trujillo is the mother of Juan Jiménez Trujillo, a young student from North Fort Myers, Florida, who died at age 16 after eating what he believed was an edible marijuana candy.
Juan received his first phone at age 12 and, shortly after, opened his Snapchat account.
Although Trujillo forced him to close the account every time he caught him using the application, Juan continued to communicate on Snapchat.
According to court documents, the app's algorithm connected Juan with marijuana-themed content, which made him curious to try the drug.
"There comes a time in life when children begin to make their own decisions. And it is very difficult because, no matter how well you educate them, the danger is out there. So why does Snapchat give that freedom for drug traffickers to find to the children?" Trujillo asserts with desperation.
"Why does Snapchat give that freedom for drug traffickers to find children?"
Diana Trujillo Gaviria, mother of a fentanyl victim
22 teenagers died from overdoses every week in 2022
Recent research highlights that an average of 22 adolescents ages 14 to 18 died each week of 2022 from drug overdoses in the United States, raising the mortality rate for this group to 5.2 per 100,000 people.
Researchers say that trend has been driven by fentanyl found in counterfeit pills.
"Teenagers may not be aware of the high risk involved in experimenting with pills, given the recent increase in counterfeit pills," explains Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher and co-author of the study that was published January 11 in The New England. Journal of Medicine.
"It is often impossible to tell the difference with the naked eye between a real medication that was prescribed by a doctor and a counterfeit version with a potentially fatal dose of fentanyl. It is urgent that adolescents receive accurate information about the real risks and strategies so that they can stay safe," he says in an interview with UCLA Health.
Juan Jiménez Trujillo with his mother Diana Trujillo Gaviria.
Juan died at the age of 16, after ingesting what he believed was an edible marijuana candy.Social Media Victims Law Center
Through tears, Trujillo explains that her son Juan was a fun, outgoing and very intelligent young man who dreamed of studying business management.
However, he explains that he began receiving friend requests from drug dealers, whom he did not know, due to Snapchat's Quick Add option.
On February 22, 2021, Juan contacted a dealer on Snapchat who offered to deliver him a candy laced with marijuana in the parking lot near his home, but in reality, what he received was a candy that had lethal doses of fentanyl, ketamine, and cocaine.
"On the morning of February 23 I woke up at 6:00 in the morning and went to wake him up, but I will never be able to forget that I found him dead in his bed. He still had the school computer on his chest, because he had started to doing his schoolwork when he ate the thing that killed him," says Trujillo.
Many of these dealers use pill emojis in their Snapchat usernames.
In 2021, a former Mexican law student was convicted of running a drug smuggling operation that used Mexican teenagers attending high school in San Diego as cross-border couriers.
[The opioid crisis is not just a white problem: deaths among Hispanics have skyrocketed]
Osvaldo Mendivil Tamayo, 22, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamine.
According to federal prosecutors and court documents, Mendivil used Snapchat to conduct much of his business.
Investigators hacked into his app account and within weeks intercepted images of tables stacked with bricks of drugs and close-ups showing the quality of the narcotics.
His accomplices sent him information about possible young people who could be used as messengers to his Snapchat account.
The messages often contained photographs of the students' government- and school-issued identification cards, as well as information about how, when, and where they typically crossed the border.
A federal judge sentenced him to seven years and one month in prison, and ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents seized at least 330 pounds of drugs linked to Mendivil and his couriers.
The potency of synthetic opioids allows criminal cartels to make enormous amounts of money from small amounts that can be easily hidden in people's pockets or backpacks.
Mexico's largest cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, obtain the chemical precursors needed to make synthetic opioids in China, produce them in secret factories in Mexico, and then smuggle them into the United States.
In 2022 alone, the DEA seized 379 million deadly doses of fentanyl, enough to kill every man, woman and child in the United States.
According to a study published by the National Library of Medicine in 2023, overdose rates among Hispanics increased 287.5%, compared to 160% for non-Hispanics between 2010 and 2021.
The research also shows that fentanyl-related deaths increased by 7,150% among Hispanics compared to 2,052% among non-Hispanics.
"We observed disparities in the growth of overdose mortality among Hispanics, compared to non-Hispanics, from 2010 to 2021. These disparities show the urgency of developing solutions that take into account the social and structural inequalities that exacerbate the effects of opioid overdose crisis in Hispanic communities," the researchers conclude.
"We will continue fighting until the end"
Large technology companies have been in the eye of the media storm in recent months, and this Wednesday's hearing in the Senate is just one more chapter in a series of processes that they have had to face.
In October 2023, a state court judge in Los Angeles refused to dismiss a case accusing Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok and YouTube of designing and developing their platforms to "addict" children and teenagers. , causing them a series of mental and physical health problems.
Weeks later, a federal judge in Los Angeles similarly ruled that Snap;
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram;
Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, could not use the federal immunity law – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – to avoid hundreds of individual lawsuits accusing those platforms of causing problems. mental and emotional health in children.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," the section reads.
Daniel Figueroa, with his mother Perla Mendoza.
Figueroa died at the age of 20 when he bought fentanyl-laced pills from a dealer via Snapchat.Social Media Victims Law Center
Section 230 has been so used by social media companies to gain immunity from prosecution that it is often referred to as "the 26 words that created the Internet."
"Section 230 protects social media platforms from liability for posting third-party content, but this case arises from Snapchat's dangerously flawed design," says Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center.
Court documents from the lawsuit filed by the parents of fentanyl victims show that Snapchat alleges that the plaintiffs have mischaracterized how the platform works and intended to seek dismissal of the case based on Section 230. However, In January of this year a judge ruled that the parents' lawsuit could move forward and proceed to trial.
According to family members, other problematic features of Snapchat are that it notifies users when a person takes a screenshot of one of their posts, in addition to the ability to geolocate other people and its algorithms that suggest new connections based on demographic data. .
Perla Mendoza, another of the people involved in the lawsuit, found that Snap did little to prevent the illegal sale of drugs in the weeks and months after the death of her son, Daniel Figueroa, who died at the age of 20 when He bought fentanyl-laced pills from a dealer on Snapchat.
According to the lawsuit documents, Mendoza created her own account and discovered that the dealer who sold drugs to her son was posting images with hundreds of pills, so she made multiple reports to the app's help center that were not answered, and It took them eight months to revoke the
dealer
's account .
Meanwhile, Jaime Puerta says that in recent days he has focused all his energy, and the pain over the death of his son Daniel, on Victims of Illicit Drug Use, a foundation he created to warn about the dangers of the use of social networks among young people in an era plagued by deaths due to fentanyl smuggling in the United States.
“I know that the pain is very great and you feel like you are dying.
But we parents have to get out of bed and do something about it, because we don't want anyone else to have to experience what we are experiencing.
That is why we will continue fighting until the end,” he stated.