New York
The family of a Missouri teenager is suing Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, alleging that the social media platform facilitated her rape when she was 12 years old. Snapchat features like Quick Add and Snap Map allowed attacker Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios to connect and groom the girl, known as JF, the complaint alleges.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Missouri state court, also names Valentín Ríos as a defendant. Valentín Ríos recently pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape or attempted statutory rape and one count of enticement or attempted enticement of a child; He was sentenced to 18 years.
Wednesday’s lawsuit is just the latest case seeking to hold Snapchat accountable for sexual abuse that young users say they experienced because of the platform. Several families have sued the platform with similar claims and several men have been sentenced for abusing minors with whom they connected on Snapchat. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Snap in 2024, alleging that its policies and features facilitate child sexual exploitation.
Snap’s rules prohibit sexual exploitation, and the company says it uses human and automated review systems to prevent abuse and proactively root out bad actors. It has also introduced features aimed at making it more difficult for strange adults to contact young people. In response to the New Mexico lawsuit, the company told the Associated Press: “We continue to evolve our security mechanisms and policies, from leveraging advanced technology to detect and block certain activities, to unfriending suspicious accounts, to working together with law enforcement and government agencies, and much more.”
But the Missouri lawsuit claims that Snapchat knew the risks of sexual abuse of young people and should have done more to prevent them.
In 2024, Snap executives received a 133-page manual originally posted on the dark web detailing how to use Snapchat features to take advantage of young users, the complaint states. It alleges that the manual instructs predators to use Snapchat’s “Quick Add” feature, now called “Find Friends,” which recommends accounts with which a user shares mutual friends or phone contacts, and “Snap Map” to connect with victims. The complaint claims those “dangerous design features” could continue to harm children.
CNN has reached out to Snap for comment on the Missouri lawsuit. A lawyer for Valentín Ríos declined to comment.
“Unfortunately, it is not unique for pedophiles to use Snapchat’s design features to identify and connect with vulnerable children,” Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which filed the lawsuit, told CNN. “This is the perpetration of child sexual abuse on a large scale.”
Plaintiff JF began using Snapchat at the age of 11 around 2021 without her parents’ knowledge, according to the complaint. The lawsuit claims that JF does not remember the date of birth she used to sign up for the platform, but alleges that Snapchat “possesses the ability to estimate a user’s age with substantial accuracy” regardless of how someone signed up and “would have known she was younger than her self-reported age.”
Months after he began using the platform, Snapchat’s Quick Add feature allegedly recommended that Valentin-Rios, 25, connect with JF and other underage girls in the same area. The app made it appear to the girls that Valentin-Rios shared mutual friends with them, and the “Bitmoji” cartoon image associated with his account portrayed him as a “friendly-looking guy,” according to the complaint. He presented himself as a local high school boy in thousands of chats with various minors, the complaint states.
“Snap failed to warn JF, or other minors alike, that these users could be strangers or that connecting with them could be dangerous,” the complaint states.
Valentin-Rios then began sending nude photos to JF, which the lawsuit claims JF was unable to prevent because Snapchat does not offer a way to preview the content before opening it. Snapchat’s Snap Map feature, which allows users to share their live locations with friends, provided Valentin-Rios with JF’s home address and forced her to send explicit photos, according to the complaint. (Snapchat turns off live location sharing on Snap Map by default, but users can turn it on.)
Valentin-Rios raped JF in September 2021, after convincing her to run away from his house late at night; He also allegedly abused other girls in the same area, according to the complaint.
Valentin-Rios allegedly created a second Snapchat account to connect with the young women, which the lawsuit claims was a violation of Snapchat rules that the company failed to enforce.
The lawsuit also claims that internal Snap documents suggest that at the time of the attack, Snapchat was “not reviewing more than 40%” of reports from serious users, allowing reported media to disappear from the app, which is known for its ephemeral content, before it could make reviews. JF’s lawsuit seeks to discover “if and/or how many times Valentin-Rios’ accounts were reported to Snap for sexual abuse” before her rape.
The lawsuit also seeks unspecified financial damages.
Snap and other leading social media companies are facing a wave of lawsuits alleging they have intentionally addicted and harmed young people with their features and design choices. Earlier this year, Snap settled a landmark case brought by a 20-year-old woman, which resulted in Meta and YouTube being held liable for her damages, as well as a case brought by a school district.
Companies have repeatedly said they have safety features and parental control tools to protect young people, but continue to face pressure from parents and advocates.
A survey released earlier this month by the advocacy group Heat Initiative found that half of the minor users surveyed reported seeing “unsafe content or messages” on Snapchat in the past year. The survey of more than 1,000 young people aged 10 to 17, conducted in December, found that one in eight respondents reported viewing sexually suggestive content at least once a week. And one in five respondents said they believed Snapchat’s “Find Friends” feature had recommended accounts of people they didn’t know and believed to be adults.
In response to the survey, Snapchat said it invests heavily in protections for young users and believed the report did not reflect those investments.
