Snap sued over rape of minor who met adult attacker via Snapchat

The parents of a girl who was raped when she was 12 years old by an adult stranger she connected to via Snapchat have sued its parent company, Snap, and the attacker, in Missouri state court. The lawsuit filed Wednesday claims the social media company has refused to disable dangerous features in its app or warn parents about potential harms it may cause. According to the lawsuit, the girl, referred to by the initials J.F., began using Snapchat in 2021 when she was 11 without her parents' knowledge. While the app requires users to be 13 to sign up, the lawsuit says the girl does not remember what birth date she entered and that children knew they could easily bypass the minimum-age requirement. About a year after she began using Snapchat, the lawsuit says the app recommended her and teen girls from nearby high schools as friends to defendant Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, an adult who had no real-life connections to them. It did not warn the children that connecting to strangers might be dangerous. After the girl and Valentin-Rios connected, Valentin-Rios began sending her unsolicited nude photographs, the lawsuit says. "J.F. did not want these photographs and, at first, did not reciprocate but Snapchat's product design made it impossible for J.F. to avoid such explicit content," it says. As part of its Snap Maps feature, the app also provided Valentin-Rios with the girl's home address without her knowledge, according to the lawsuit. …