Snapchat sued for exposing children to smutty articles

SAN FRANCISCO — A Los Angeles law firm has sued Snapchat, charging that the popular messaging site is exposing children to "harmful, offensive, prurient and sexually offensive content."

Mark Geragos of Geragos & Geragos says Snapchat's Discover feature violates the Communications Decency Act, which requires internet services to notify customers that parental control systems are available to help them limit access to material that may be harmful to minors.

The suit, brought on behalf of parents seeking class action status, says that Snapchat's Terms of Service includes no warnings about the potentially offensive content found on Snapchat Discover.

The feature, first introduced in January of 2015, is a curated collection of articles and items from media outlets such as Buzzfeed, People, Vice, Cosmopolitan, MTV, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal and others.

Most of the articles are innocuous, including topics such as "How to make watermelon pops," "The French girl's guide to perfect skin" and "First artificially inseminated penguin born in Japan."

However some include material parents might not want their children seeing, according to Geragos. Some examples:

- 12 awkward things that happen when you have sex with a new partner

- Has an alien ever gotten you pregnant?

- 10 things he thinks when he can't make you orgasm

- People share their secret sex rules.

- Everything you wanted to know about penis tattoos.

Geragos hopes to convince a court to allow the case to become a class action suit. He brought it in the name of a minor child identified only as John Doe.

"I’m just shoving it up snapchat’s filter," he told USA TODAY.

When the suit refers to minors, it means people between the ages of 13 and 18. Under Snapchat's own Terms of Service, no one under the age of 13 is allowed to create an account on or use the service.

Given that policy, it’s difficult to consider the material available on the site too obscene for that audience, said Ken Paulson, president of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center in Washington D.C.

While it is “undeniably tacky, rude and crude, so is a lot of the content that 13-year-olds ingest daily on the internet,” he said.

The original Communications Decency Act was passed in 1996 to regulate pornographic material accessible to children on the internet. Almost immediately large portions of it were struck down as overly impinging on free speech, in part because parents were not allowed to decide for themselves what material they deemed acceptable for their children to view.

One of the suit’s allegations is that Snapchat fails to notify parents of the availability of filtering options to protect their children from content they deem inappropriate.

However, Paulson says that’s a hard argument to make in 2016.

“Nineteen years later, doesn’t every parent know that this software exists? It’s a common element of parenting these days,” he said.

In a statement, Snapchat said that while it hasn't been served with a complaint in this lawsuit, is is sorry if people are offended. Its Discover partners have editorial independence, which is something the company supports, it said.

Geragos is known as a celebrity lawyer who has been involved in several high profile cases, representing Michael Jackson and Winona Rider.