Families of the victims of the 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, filed two lawsuits on Friday against Instagram’s parent company Meta, Activision Blizzard and its parent Microsoft and the gunmaker Daniel Defense, claiming they co-operated to market dangerous weapons to impressionable teens such as the Uvalde shooter.
The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of giving gun manufacturers “an unsupervised channel to speak directly to minors, in their homes, at school, even in the middle of the night,” with only token oversight. As a result, the complaint alleges, he became fixated on acquiring the same weapon and using it to commit the killings, even though he had never fired a gun in real life before.