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Jaime Puerta keeps a shrine to his son, Daniel, behind his desk — a collection of candles, old pictures and his son’s beloved toy car.
He also keeps a stash of naloxone, the lifesaving opioid overdose reversal drug, and a yellow poster Puerta carried while marching with other grieving parents outside the headquarters of Snap, creator of the disappearing messaging app Snapchat. At the bottom of the poster is the solemn slogan of his son’s life:
“Forever 16.”
Puerta is among the more than 60 families who are suing Snap, arguing the Santa Monica-based company is responsible for drug sales to teens that are facilitated through its app. Snap denies the allegations in the wrongful death cases, which accuse the company of designing an app that is inherently dangerous.
In a statement, the company said it removed more than 2.4 million pieces of drug-related content last year, disabling 516,000 related accounts, and noted that it blocks searches for drug-related terms and instead redirects users to resources about their dangers.
The cases, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, could have broader implications for social media companies and could weaken a key legal defense long used by Big Tech companies to shield themselves from liability.
“We’re in the middle of a reckoning for Snap and other social media platforms,” said Tom Galvin, executive director of Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit focused on internet safety.
Daniel Puerta-Johnson died at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles on April 6, 2020, a few days after his father found him unconscious in bed. Half of a blue tablet lay on his son’s dresser, Puerta said.
It looked like oxycodone, but was actually fentanyl, a far more potent painkiller that can suppress a person’s breathing, according to the lawsuit. The investigation into Daniel’s death, the lawsuit said, determined that he met a drug dealer through Snapchat a few days before he died.
“What the hell is going on here?” Puerta remembered thinking.
A former Marine, Puerta now zigzags the nation sharing his son’s story. Last month, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging lawmakers to take action to stop what he characterized as low-level drug dealers selling with impunity on Snapchat and other social media apps.
Attorneys for Puerta and the other families have argued that Snapchat’s design features — specifically its signature disappearing messages, a tool that can be used to connect with strangers on the app, and what plaintiffs call ineffective methods of verifying users’ ages and identities — make it easy for drug dealers to connect with teens and avoid detection.
“Snapchat,” the lawsuit reads, “has evolved into a digital open-air drug market.”
Snap’s lawyers have argued the company is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a 1996 law that insulates platforms from liability for user content — and asked to have the case tossed out.
But Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ruled last year that the matter could proceed on several counts, including the argument that the app’s design was itself destructive. Both sides have argued that the law is clear on the matter, but the judge disagreed.
“What is clear and obvious,” Riff wrote, “is that the law is unsettled and in a state of development.”
In December, justices on California’s 2nd District Court of Appeals denied a petition from Snap to overturn Riff’s ruling, paving the way for the proceedings in L.A. to resume. During a status conference in the case last month, Riff told the attorneys for Snap and the plaintiffs that he wanted the cases to move expeditiously.
Before the hearing, Puerta and several other parents gathered on the steps of the courthouse. One mother carried a framed portrait of her daughter, another clutched a flag with her son’s picture and a familiar refrain: “Forever 13.”
Social media platforms have, over the last decade, faced growing public pleas to address evidence that their algorithms may be harmful, especially to teens, said Galvin of the internet safety nonprofit. But the platforms, including Snapchat, whose financial models rely on maximizing the number of users and how long users spend on the apps, haven’t done enough, he said.
“Next it was, ‘Look, if you don’t do it, someone will probably make you,’ ” he said.
Facebook, Instagram, Discord and YouTube all face legal accusations that they have caused harm to children, and last fall, a Florida mother sued Character.AI, alleging its chatbot technology was responsible after her 14-year-old son took his own life. Lawyers for the company, which asked to have the lawsuit dismissed on free speech grounds, said in court papers that the chatbot had discouraged the boy from hurting himself.
The platforms have also increasingly come under scrutiny from prosecutors and politicians.
Oceanside and Coronado Unified sue Instagram, TikTok and Facebook in federal court, accusing them of fueling a youth mental health epidemic.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his counterparts from other states filed lawsuits against TikTok last fall, arguing that the app’s features, such as beauty filters and infinite scrolling, were harming young people’s mental health. A few weeks earlier, New Mexico’s attorney general sued Snap, arguing that it was designed to addict young people and that its algorithm facilitated the sexual exploitation of children. Snap responded, saying it had worked diligently to find and remove bad actors and would keep doing so as online threats evolved.
Several states, including California, passed laws last year restricting children’s access to social media or requiring parental consent. Some of those laws are being challenged on 1st Amendment grounds.
And before he finished his second term as U.S. surgeon general earlier this year, Dr. Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require social media companies to include warning labels on their platforms similar to those mandatory on cigarette packaging. The platforms, he said, should be required to publicly share data on health effects.
“While the platforms claim they are making their products safer, Americans need more than words,” Murthy wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. “We need proof.”
Sixty-four families have signed on to the fentanyl wrongful death suits against Snap in L.A. by the Social Media Victims Law Center, the Seattle-based legal firm representing Puerta.
“Every day we hear from new parents who have lost kids,” said Matthew Bergman, the firm’s founding attorney. “It’s just unbelievable.”
In addition to Puerta’s son, the lawsuits tell the stories of a Palmdale teen who died a few days after his 17th birthday, cutting short his dream of becoming a bull rider; a pharmacist’s daughter with aspirations of becoming a forensic psychologist; and a Santa Monica boy whose parents are advocating for Sammy’s Law, federal legislation in his name that would require platforms to allow parents to track children’s online activity using third-party software.
From the sale of deadly drugs to child sexual abuse images, social media can pose dangers. Lawmakers are targeting the platform’s algorithms, designs and features amid calls to hold tech platforms accountable for safety risks.
Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, addressed the tragedies directly under tense questioning by members of Congress last year.
“There are a number of parents whose children have been able to access illegal drugs on your platform,” said Laphonza Butler, then one of California’s senators. “What do you say to those parents?”
Spiegel looked down and shifted in his seat. “Senator, we are devastated that we cannot …” he said. Butler cut him off.
“To the parents,” she said. “What do you say to those parents?”
“I’m so sorry that we have not been able to prevent these tragedies,” he said. “We work very hard to block all search terms related to drugs from our platform.”
David Décary-Hétu, a University of Montreal criminology professor, said the situation of dealers peddling drugs on social platforms had “slowly gotten better.”
Last fall, he and other researchers scoured online for people selling drugs on several platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram and X. While they did find some, he said, the sellers used cryptic language — just the letter “C” or a snowflake emoji, for instance, instead of referencing “cocaine” — to get around algorithms the companies use to root out dealers.
But even when dealers’ accounts are removed, they can create new ones easily using a different email address or phone number, said Eric Feinberg, vice president of the Coalition for a Safer Web, an internet safety nonprofit that has researched drug sales on social media.
“That’s the whole problem with this stuff, it’s whack-a-mole,” he said.
For his part, Puerta said he would like to see Snapchat — whose 13-and-older age requirement can be quickly skirted by entering a fake birthday — take more sweeping steps, such as requiring users to upload a copy of their ID.
As a boy, Daniel had a deeply inquisitive spirit.
But around the time he went through puberty — and got his first cellphone — Puerta noticed a stark change in his son’s demeanor. Always a great student who dreamed of becoming a software engineer, his grades dropped to Ds and Fs, and during a father-son trip to Maui a decade ago Daniel almost never looked up from his screen.
“He was completely immersed in that phone.”
After a growth spurt early in high school, he told his dad he felt uncomfortable in his body and so anxious that it felt like a race car was tearing through his mind. He began self-medicating with pot and then Xanax.
But after a stint at a wilderness camp in 2018, Puerta said he felt like he finally had his son back. Then came the isolation of the early pandemic shutdowns. On the first day of April in 2020, Puerta found his son barely breathing. He was taken off life support a few days later.
“It haunts me,” said Puerta, who blames himself for not researching the apps on his son’s phone more closely, for not asking more questions.
For two years, he left Daniel’s room untouched, but the image of the empty bed tormented him, so Puerta replaced it with two recliners.
He added a bookshelf, filling it with items, such as Daniel’s boyhood rock collection and a lei from their trip to Maui. Daniel’s ashes sit in a wooden box, tucked in front of the remains of his beloved dog Birdie.
“I commune with my son here,” he said. “It’s my go-to place. No one can take that away from me.”
Puerta keeps in touch with his son’s closest friends, including Sammi Ratkay.
The two met in first grade at Plum Canyon Elementary, but got close during their freshman year of high school. Neither had a first-period class, so they often hung out in Ratkay’s sister’s car blasting music on their phones.
Like most everyone in their school at the time, Ratkay, now 22, says, Daniel spent a lot of time on Snapchat. They messaged each other on the app daily. He sent clips of himself dancing and shared old photos, including one of himself with a bad haircut as a boy.
It was from a group message on the platform, she said, that she learned Daniel was in the hospital.
“Social media was our lives,” she said. “I hate to say it, but it was everything.”
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