In the past year, a record number of US teenagers have died from lethal drugs purchased online. A disproportionate amount of cases are pills bought through contacts on Snapchat. In the kind of knee-jerk legal action that is typical of the US legal system, families of the deceased teenagers are now suing Snapchat for failing to stop the trade of illegal drugs on their platform.
I understand that these people are hurting, and that they take every opportunity to find someone to direct their rage at, and someone to blame. However, what's happening here is yet another step on our dangerous path towards dumbing down humanity.
While Snapchat are part to the equation, they are ultimately not to blame for what people choose to communicate on their platform, and they are definitely not responsible for their users taking lethal doses of drugs. They might have some culpability in not being diligent enough in who gets to use their communication channel, and for what, but this is first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility for the seller and the buyer.
The people who took the drugs are personally responsible for their own death by gulping down unknown pills from an unknown source in their search for a rush. The seller is personally responsible for selling lethal drugs, which is a serious offense covered by law. Snapchat is the messenger, and trying to make them the culprit sets a dangerous precedent.
I will now engage in what might seem like a "reductio ad absurdum", but I would argue that what I present below are some perfectly valid equivalences.
Imagine for a moment that the transaction had taken place without involving the Internet. A drug pusher writes his phone number on a toilet wall, some teenager sees it and calls him up, they meet in a back alley, the teenager buys a bag of pills, ingests a lethal dose and dies.
Who is to blame? Shall we take legal action against the phone company? The maker of the telephone that the buyer used to call the dealer? The possibly different maker of the phone that the dealer used to answer the call? Maybe the owner of the toilet where the seller scribbled his phone number is to blame for not immediately erasing the message before anyone could read it? Or the company who made the pen that was used to write the message? Perhaps the manufacturer of the bathroom tiles should be sued for making a surface so obviously suitable to write upon for the purpose of soliciting drugs? Or the builder who put up the tiles? And that back alley where they met, can't we sue whoever owns that spot of land and allowed such an obviously illegal transaction to take place on their property?
What if the drug dealer had instead posted a photocopied note on a telephone pole? Should the telephone company then be blamed for providing a wooden pole so obviously suitable for fastening a drug pushing note to it? Is the maker of the photocopier somehow responsible for allowing notes with illegal content to be copied on their machines? What about the papermaker? The city who allowed that telephone pole to be placed on a public street? The people who taught the dealer and the teenager how to read and write?
I'm not saying that Snapchat should allow illegal activity to continue unhindered on their platform. If they can stop it, fine. However, they can not by any reasonable standards be held responsible for what their users choose to say to each other. The responsibility, and the accountability, for the communication and interaction between two people rests on those two people, not on the manufacturer of their chosen means for communication. In this respect, the Internet is no more special than the telephone system, an old school message board or, indeed, a bathroom wall.
We need to face the fact that online service providers can not protect us from our own stupidity. We need to be less stupid, not demand that Snapchat do the thinking for us.
