A 14-year-old boy, along with his mother, has filed a lawsuit against Snapchat in a U.S. district court in California.
The lawsuit, which is seeking to be upgraded to class action status, is over the fact that the app's Discover section serves inappropriate content to minors using Snapchat.
Because minors and their parents are not warned regarding the sexually explicit content on Discover, Snapchat is now being accused of violating the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was passed for the regulation of pornographic material online.
Snapchat once had an image of being the "sexting" app, as users took advantage of the self-deleting messages of the service to send nude pictures to others. The company has since been trying to eliminate this image by becoming a content provider through features such as Discover, which was launched early last year.
In the filed lawsuit, it was claimed that the boy was exposed to images of Disney characters in sexually explicit situations through an article that was posted on BuzzFeed's Discover channel. The lawsuit also mentions other articles with inappropriate content that the boy was exposed to in the first week of this month alone.
"Millions of parents in the United States today are unaware that Snapchat is curating and publishing this profoundly sexual and offensive content to their children," the lawsuit states, adding that Snapchat has prioritized monetizing Discover over the safety of the minors that user the service.
In an email, a Snapchat representative said that while the company has not yet received a copy of the lawsuit, it is apologizing for any offense that the feature has caused.
The spokeswoman, however, said that Snapchat supports the editorial independence of its content partners for its Discover feature. Snapchat exerts a heavy influence on the look and the feel of the stories that its Discover partners release, but does not police the content of these articles.
This last remark could play a big role in the lawsuit, if it moves forward, as federal law has granted internet companies and platform providers immunity on the material that is propagated on their services by third-party companies. However, the attorneys of the lawsuit are pushing for a different scenario in this case, as Snapchat chose the media outlets that they will team up with for Discover.
The filed lawsuit is seeking to claim civil penalties from Snapchat, along with a requirement for the app to provide a warning about the sexual content that it contains.
