Two Stacks

 The episode opens by introducing the Superhuman series—how corporations became entities with more legal rights than humans but none of the accountability. This isn't just about technology or social media—it's about power, who wields it, and how we built a system where companies can harm children at scale and face no consequences.

Then Laura Marquez-Garrett of the Social Media Victims Law Center, who represents over 4,000 families harmed by social media, walks us through the massive gap between what platforms claim and what actually happens. She exposes the hidden realities no safety guide mentions—what law enforcement knows but parents don't, why evidence vanishes by design, and how platforms' actual practices contradict their public promises.

When my 15-year-old son Avery convinced me to let him use Snapchat in 10th grade, I thought I understood the risks. I'd read "The Anxious Generation." I worried about screen time and social pressure. I had no idea what was really happening on the platform. This episode covers the information I wish had been made more publicly available, so that I would have known what I was dealing with.

00:00 - Two Stacks of Paper (Season Introduction)

11:05 - Laura Introducton

13:05 - Snapchat Knew

18:04 - Colorado SB 86 

23:35 - Product Design

29:15 - Reporting Criminal Activity to Snapchat

32:21 - Perla Mendoza's Hunt for Justice

39:13 - Unreported Crimes

44:36 - Parents Can't Fathom the Truth

Content warning: teen death, drug sales, and exploitation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

I have two stacks of paper on my desk. In the left stack, police reports, warrants, digital forensics from the investigation into my son Avery's death. December nineteenth, twenty twenty four. He was sixteen. In the right stack, Snapchat safety promises, their terms of service, press releases about how they're keeping teens safe. The gap between these two stacks is what this podcast is about. But let me back up. I never wanted to give my son a phone. I was raised without screens. We didn't even have a TV until I was ten. And then it was hidden in a cabinet. My childhood was sticks as toys, books read out loud, camping trips, the kind of childhood where boredom bred creativity. I went to a Waldorf school where my parents worked tirelessly to build community, where imagination mattered more than metrics. That's the childhood I wanted for Avery. And for years I managed it. Books instead of video games, camping trips, bike rides, his mind freed to develop without algorithms deciding what he should want next. But screens are everywhere now. His step siblings got phones, his classmates got phones. By middle school, he was turning into the weird kid without one. His mom and I held the line as long as we could, but eventually, you cave. You tell yourself they need to learn these tools. You tell yourself you can teach safe habits. For two more years I held firm on social media. No Instagram, no TikTok, no Snapchat. He begged. Dad, nobody uses regular texting anymore. I can't survive socially in high school without it. Everyone's on Snapchat. When he was in tenth grade, I caved. Life was different now after the isolation my son experienced during the pandemic in seventh and eighth grade. This was the new normal, I told myself. Within a year, he was dead. Let me tell you a little bit more about who Avery was. He loved medicine and psychology, always asking these big questions about health and brain chemistry. He was charismatic and understood people. He could recognize the person in the room who was suffering, and he had a gift and a smile that would cheer them up. He was brilliant that way, seeing patterns that others missed. The irony isn't lost on me that he would have understood everything I'm telling you about better than most adults. I'm not alone in this. Since January, I've met dozens of parents with near identical stories, different kids, different states, same platform, same patterns. Parents who thought they were being careful, kids who seemed fine until suddenly they weren't. Evidence that disappeared before anyone could understand what happened. We're all asking the same question. How did we get here? The answer doesn't start where you'd think. It doesn't start with Mark Zuckerberg in a dorm room or Evan Spiegel inventing disappearing messages. It starts a century ago with Freud's nephew and a group of debutants smoking cigarettes on Fifth Avenue. What happened to Avery, what's happening to kids everywhere, it's not a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed. A system built over a hundred years, piece by piece, precedent by precedent, lobby by lobby. This series is going to show you how we built corporations that are, in every legal and practical sense, superhuman. They have constitutional rights, but can't be jailed. They have religious freedom, but no conscience. They know more about your kids than you ever will, but claim they're just neutral pipes when something goes wrong. Think about every comic book you've ever read. The origin story is always the same. Someone gets incredible power. What separates the hero from the villain? The hero accepts responsibility. Spider-Man's uncle tells him, with great power comes great responsibility, and he lives by it. The villain? The villain uses their power for self-interest, profit, control. Now imagine a villain with a legal team. A villain who rewrites the rules so they can't be held accountable. A villain who convinces everyone they're actually the hero. That's what we've built. Corporate entities with superhuman abilities, omniscience through data collection, immortality through perpetual existence, telepathy through algorithmic influence. But they've lobbied their way out of the responsibility part. They've rewritten the story so they're always the hero, connecting people, building community while the bodies and mental harms pile up in the background. We'll start with Edward Bernays, who discovered that humans don't make rational choices, but are actually driven by unconscious desires we don't even understand. He taught corporations how to bypass our conscious minds and speak directly to our ids. Cigarettes weren't just cigarettes anymore, they were torches of freedom. That playbook? It's now running millions of times per second on every smartphone. Then we'll trace how corporations became legal persons. An 1886 railroad case that nobody remembers changed everything. Suddenly, companies had rights. Then came more rights. Speech rights, religious rights, privacy rights, all the rights of humans, with none of the vulnerabilities. We'll follow the money. We'll show you how a dollar donated in Washington becomes a policy that protects platforms instead of kids. How Section 230 went from protecting free speech to shielding companies from any accountability. We'll expose what these platforms don't want you to see. Drug dealers operating openly in DMs, sextortion networks, the way friend suggestion algorithms become stranger danger pipelines. All of it is protected by design features that destroy evidence before parents, police, or prosecutors can act. But here's what really shattered my understanding of how the world works. After Avery died, I found myself in a legal system that somehow felt more broken than I was. And in that wreckage, searching through documents and depositions and terms of service, I discovered something that doesn't feel real. They know. The platforms know exactly what's happening. The Surgeon General knows. They issued an advisory. The American Psychological Association knows. They issued their own warning. Internal company documents show that they know which features cause harm, which users are vulnerable, even the specific moments when teens are feeling worthless and defeated. They know. They just calculated that the profit is worth more than the price. This story isn't about technology, it's about power. About how we handed corporations the ability to shape minds at scale, then removed any mechanism to hold them accountable. About how the same techniques that sold cigarettes to women in 1929 now sell validation to vulnerable teens. About how connecting people became the excuse for a business model that requires addiction. If, given the chance to continue to grow and follow his curiosities, there's no doubt in my mind that my son would have understood this. He would have seen through the manipulation, recognized the patterns, called out the absurdity of a company claiming to care while designing features that demonstrably cause harm. He had that kind of mind, always questioning, always digging deeper. This podcast isn't about blame, not really. The individual decisions, mine or Avery's mom, the companies, even the dealers, they're almost beside the point. This is about something bigger, about how we built a world where a company can know more about your kid than you do, connect them to strangers by default, destroy the evidence automatically, and then when tragedy strikes, point to their terms of service and say, We're just a platform. So this is for him and for every parent who feels crazy for worrying. For anyone who's looked at the gap between what companies say and what actually happens and thought, this can't be legal. You're right, it shouldn't be. And once you understand how we got here, once you see the full century-long con, you'll understand why changing this is so hard. But you'll also see the cracks in the system, the places where we can apply pressure, the specific fixes that could save lives. I'm Aaron Ping. This is Superhuman. The story about how corporations became more powerful than people, and how we might take that power back. It starts with a man named Edward Bernays, watching his uncle Sigmund Freud explain the unconscious mind over dinner in Vienna. What Bernays heard that night would change everything. We'll get to that story in episode two, but first let's start where this all began for me. Two stacks of paper that shouldn't exist in the same universe. A conversation with Laura Marquez-Guerrett from the Social Media Victims Law Center, trying to make sense of how a company's public safety promises and a teenager's death could be so completely disconnected. How the system that's supposed to protect kids instead protects the platform. How we ended up with separate realities. One where companies claim to keep everyone safe, and another where parents bury their children. Let's compare this deck. I want this thing to be on tape.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

I love you, man. You should add that we just had a wonderful day with football and pizza.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

I love that you're on the Four weeks after Avery died, I was drowning in a legal system that seemed designed to protect everyone except the kids being harmed. That's when I found Laura. She's become family. We celebrated what would have been Avery's 17th birthday together. I play football and read bedtime stories to her four kids. Her home has become a sanctuary where grief transforms into purpose. Earlier today, she told me something that explained everything. At nine years old, she read Inherit the Wind about a lawyer standing up against an entire town bent on suppressing truth that threatened their beliefs. She wanted to be Henry Drummond, defending the facts against comfortable lies. She became exactly that, except her courtroom is in 2025. And instead of religious fundamentalism, she's fighting something different. A society that worships distraction and massive stock gains while blaming parents for not being omniscient. Laura represents over 4,000 families. She's seen the documents. These companies never want it exposed. She knows they designed these systems to exploit kids, then built legal shields to evade accountability. These platforms have godlike abilities. They use it to maximize engagement. Laura has a different superpower. The ability to see through their lies and the courage to fight an entire industry that society largely defends. Like Drummond in that Tennessee courtroom, she's not fighting a legal battle. She's fighting the right to call a harmful thing harmful, even when the world insists it's progress. To me, she is the very definition of a superhero.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

This is something that I promise you this is gonna be hard for people to understand. In your case, Avery connects with this dealer in December of 2024. Two months prior, law enforcement had started investigating this guy. More than a month prior, law enforcement reached out to Snapchat with a search warrant, identified the account, and said, Hey, we think this is a drug dealer, we need all this data. Three weeks at least, I think it was, we figured out it was three or four weeks before Avery dies. Snapchat, the human beings at Snapchat, they hand over a data file to police that contains evidence that this guy's drug dealing. And then they do absolutely nothing about the dealer who is prolific, who has been selling on Snapchat for years. So in late November, Snapchat absolutely, unquestionably knows Travis Olympia is dealing drugs. Avery comes back into town Christmas break. He's curious, he looks up MDMA. Travis Olympia is a well-known dealer in the area who is still dealing on the same username that Snapchat knows is being used to deal drugs. Right? This is what Snap is doing to millions of kids. This should be criminal, in my personal opinion. That is the piece that I think people will just not understand is that look, Snap knew. This is not some vague, like maybe. This is Snap had actual knowledge about this dealer, and it didn't do a goddamn thing.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

They knew. And in case you missed it, Snapchat took three weeks to respond to police. I've spoken to the detective who led that investigation into Travis Olympia. They were taking it seriously, had surveillance staked out, were watching him come and go. They just needed Snapchat's records to confirm the drug deals matched his movements. But Snapchat didn't respond. After three weeks of silence, police had to pull the resources. The detective told me they would have made an arrest if Snapchat had responded in a reasonable time frame. Here's the truly insane part. Even if Snapchat had responded quickly, they might not have been able to help. Because messages don't just disappear from users' phones, they delete off Snapchat's back-end systems too. When police finally do get records, they're getting glimpses, random snippets. Not necessarily evidence, but fragments. Think about that. A platform designed to destroy evidence, a company that takes three weeks to respond to warrants about drug dealers selling to kids. And when they finally respond, the evidence is already gone. By design.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Okay, so this is a really open-ended question, and the answer probably changes based on the day and the situation. But as a general matter, my understanding, based on the litigation, based on what we know, based on law enforcement we've spoken to, based on conversations with Snapchat in the course of the litigation, is that when police come and say, hey, you need to preserve stuff, they perhaps take a snapshot. Some of these platforms call it a snapshot. So they may grab whatever data is there. That begs the question of in the case of Snapchat, what data's there? Have they not preserved some? Has some been destroyed? It does not operate. It's not typical of other platforms in our experience and what we've heard from law enforcement. Even when they get data, it is not complete data. Big chunks are missing. Snap also has features where if I send you a snap and I don't want you to have it, even if you've saved it, I can go in and delete it. We have cases where family have been like, hey, we have one instance where they confronted the dealer and then they're watching in horrors this dealer is deleting stuff out of their deceased daughter's account. I don't know in those circumstances if that stuff gets handed over to police. We have another instance where the police did not arrest the dealer until they were able to crack the phone, and in the phone they find the last snap with the dealer, but they had gotten records from Snapchat, and that last snap wasn't in those records. If you ask Snap, why? We don't know.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Let's flip to the other stack. These are Snapchat's official community guidelines. What concerned parents find when they search, is Snapchat safe? When we identify Snapchatters engaging in any of the following activities, we immediately disable their accounts and in some instances refer the conduct to law enforcement. Attempted selling, exchanging, or facilitating dangerous illicit drugs, immediately disable their accounts. Travis Olympia, active for at least three weeks after Snapchat had proof. They continue. Continually working, better understand, prevent harm.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

So the Colorado SB 86, that law in broad terms, which did not, the tech companies were able to kill it.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

In February, two months after Avery died, I testified for a bill that would have required platforms to respond to police warrants within 72 hours and actually take down dealer accounts. While I was there, I listened to another mother whose case got zero response from Snapchat. Zero. Then 17th Judicial District Attorney Brian Mason took the stand.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

In my first four years as the DA, I have filed a juvenile homicide case that was committed over a girl. I have filed a juvenile homicide case that was committed over a dispute about a pair of jeans. I have filed a juvenile homicide case that was committed over a dispute about a sweatshirt. And in each one of those cases, social media was the connector that brought those juveniles together and directly led to the homicide. And again, a juvenile cannot legally go into a gun store and buy a gun. So where do they go? They go to the marketplace on social media. And when a crime like a homicide or many of the other crimes that have already been testified to here today occur, and we as law enforcement, either the DA's office or the law enforcement agencies that we work with, send a lawful subpoena or search warrant to social media, it often goes unaddressed. We hear nothing for days and days and days at a time. And in order to solve a crime like a homicide, time is of the essence.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

The Colorado bill said one of the provisions would have provided you have to respond to search warrants within 72 hours. And if SNAP or these platforms, if these platforms want more time, they have to go to court. That is critical because crimes are happening via these platforms. Law enforcement will ask for records. Sometimes the platforms respond, sometimes they don't, sometimes they object, sometimes they delay, sometimes they ignore entirely. They do whatever the hell they want. And our law enforcement does not have the resources to pursue those. Ultimately, we should have is a system where, hey, social media company was making billions, billions of dollars off our kids. When you get a search warrant, you have 72 hours to respond. If you cannot respond, you need to go into court and request more time and show that you're entitled to more time. That's what that bill would have done, among other things, but also would have required, in the instance with Travis Olympia, if Snap had actual knowledge that he was dealing drugs and it did before Avery died. It did. Then Snap would have had to take him down. If Snap has knowledge in that scenario where Snap hands that proof of drug dealing over to police, Snap would have had to close that account down. The question is, why does that matter? How is that effective? That's a big deal. Because Snap also can block on the device level. So if these platforms, when they had knowledge of sexual abuse of minors, severe bullying, drugs, illegal firearm sales, whatever the crime is, if they had to actually just take that account down and block on the device level, here's what that means. If I'm a drug dealer in Snapchat, every time I post a menu, if somebody sees that and reports me, Snap has three days, four days to look at the report. There's the evidence. The picture of me posting a drug menu selling drugs. They take my account down. What that means is every time I advertise drugs, there's a risk. My phone gets shut down as far as Snapchat's concerned. That's a really expensive business model. Snap is not like your phone contacts. All of the people you've connected with on Snap aren't just gonna stick around. Like you have to go back and find these people. It is not easy to recreate a Snap account. They would have to start over, meet a kid, get everyone to add. And my point to it is that's 50 bucks for a new phone, right? If these platforms actually gave a dam and said, okay, when we find proof that you violated our terms and violated the law, We're gonna take this account down. The drug dealing would go down exponentially because dealers couldn't afford to deal. That would be a new phone every time they got reported on these platforms had actual knowledge.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

SB 86, it passed both chambers with bipartisan support. 23 district attorneys backed it. The Senate overrode the governor's veto 29-6. It should have become law. Then something strange happened. A far-right gun group that had essentially been broke for years suddenly launched a massive text and email campaign. Hundreds of thousands of messages flooding Republican legislators over a single weekend. They claimed this child safety bill was about gun control because it mentioned illegal ghost guns bought online. Here's what multiple sources told The Guardian. Rocky Mountain gun owners couldn't have afforded this campaign. They've been publicly struggling with funding. Then suddenly, right when this bill threatened tech companies, they had unlimited money for text, emails, and social media campaigns. Meta, Google, and TikTok all had registered lobbyists opposing the bill, but their fingerprints weren't on what killed it. Instead, a gun group that hadn't been relevant for years suddenly had the resources to terrify legislators about being primaried. This is modern lobbying, not briefcases of cash and backrooms that would be traceable. Instead, money flows through advocacy groups, think tanks, trade associations. The corporation gets what it wants. The public never sees the connection, and kids keep dying. Later in the series, we'll trace how we got here, how the PAL memo in 1971 created this entire shadow infrastructure, how Citizens United made it worse, how companies can now kill laws meant to save children's lives without their names ever appearing on the murder weapon. But for now, just remember.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Let's start from the point of Snap designs its platform not to preserve evidence. The whole origin story of Snapchat is that you have a bunch of frat boys who are trying to convince co-eds to send them naked photos and they don't want to get caught doing all the bad stuff they're doing. I wish this would disappear. Hey, that's a million-dollar idea. And so that's the whole premise. Step one is what we know is that when Snap does hand over records, that they are not as complete as other platforms.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Look at what that original impulse became. A platform where evidence vanishes, where dealers can operate without paper trails, where predators can groom without records, where kids can die without explanations. They built a platform optimized for activities that require destroying evidence. Then they marketed it to children with cartoon avatars and funny filters. From where I'm sitting, when your founding principle is how do we get away with things we shouldn't be doing? You've designed something that attracts exactly the users who need to get away with things they shouldn't be doing. The drug dealers didn't hack Snapchat, they didn't exploit some bug. They're using it exactly as it was designed to be used for activities that require evidence to disappear. That's not a flaw. That's the foundation.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

The functionality of Snapchat, it's not just about kids are gonna love it. It is about destroying the evidence. It is about providing cover for bad stuff. That's how this app gets started, right? That is the purpose of it, is to hide the truth. I talk to kids and adults all the time. Most kids don't know that it deletes on the back end. Snapchat would be just as appealing to kids if it functioned the way it does on the front end, where things disappear. That's the piece kids like. No kid believes that if they are murdered, abused, attacked, sex trafficked, and police say, I need to know what happened to this child, that snap will be like, oops, all the data's gone. My bad. No, nobody's expecting that. Especially in a kid app. Like this, they could operate it this way on the front end, which gives kids that privacy they want while preserving evidence on the back end. They could if they wanted to. The only people that back end system helps are the predators. And there's a lot of them on Snap. Some people said, oh, but why would they cover for just a couple of drug dealers? If they take down the drug dealers, they gotta take down the pedophiles, the illegal arms dealers, they gotta take down a big chunk of their business. It's thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. There's a reason that Snap is one of the most popular apps when it comes to sex tortion and predation and child abuse. But you wouldn't know it because it's a cartoon, right? It's bright colors. They advertise with children. Look, before I started this work, I had a snap. I never used it. I couldn't figure the damn thing out. But what I could figure out were those funny filters. And I remember showing those to my kids before I knew how bad it was, right? That's the point. I'm gonna show my kids these funny filters, and when they're big enough to have their own devices, they're gonna go right to it and get a snap. And I'm not gonna think anything of it because funny filters. Who's afraid of funny filters? I have yet to meet a member of law enforcement who's, hey, Snapchat's great. Any of these social media companies, but I do think when it comes to certain pieces, you will talk to plenty of law enforcement who say, Yeah, none of them are fun to work with, but Snap's the worst. It's hard to get data if they respond at all. I mean, I've spoken to law enforcement and they've told our clients, hey, Snap does not respond. I just showed you a publicly filed declaration where you've got a police officer texting a mom saying, Look, I've been calling over and over. They're not getting back. Snap designs it that way. They don't care. And I'm not gonna say, look, I'm not gonna say blanket they don't care. Do I think they're individuals within Snap that probably on some level do care? Yeah, sure. They're human beings. But they have structured and are operating both a product that is deadly and a business model that is sociopathic, prioritizing profits over people. Absolutely. And maybe they don't see that, maybe they do, but it is what it is. There are meaningful things Snap could do and they could do it quickly to stop, to help kids to make their product safer. None of the things that Snap tells the public they're doing do that. At some point they say something like, Oh, when we get into it, we can talk about it, but they don't do it. In the Rolling Stone article, it references a contractor named Tim Mackey. And the story with Tim Mackey is in early 2021, a group of parents meets with Snap executives. These were parents who lost their children, Amy Neville, Jaime Puerta, Bridget Noring, Miriam Hernandez. Snap says you can't sue us. You can't sue us because of Section 230. So you got to work with us. We're gonna do all these things. And one of the things they say to these parents is we got this guy, Tim Mackey, he's gonna create this technology so we can take these down on the back end, right? So these dealers never even get to kids because they're just taken down. Boom. So these parents are told that Mackey's gonna do this. In the Rolling Stone article, you'll see that the reporter speaks with Tim Mackey. Tim Mackey confirms, Yes, Snap never let me behind the curtain. What Snap had me do, or what Snap had him do rather, was that he went to public sites like Instagram and he would look for people to post here saying, Hey, go hit me up on Snapchat if you want drugs. And then Snap would take those down. That's the bare minimum. Now they'll say, Hey, we're proactively detecting drugs and we're taking him down. You're not. You could use those same technologies to find all the dealers on the back end and take them down, but it would have hurt engagement.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Laura showed me screenshots from another mother, Bridget Noring.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

In October 2022, Bridget Noring reports posting, reports of posting selling drugs and sending users to the telegram store for drugs. Snap repond responded it doesn't violate the terms. Where is this? Okay, so come here. Let me show you. I'm gonna turn the screen over here. This is a great example. So look, shortly before we filed our original complaint, Bridget finds a dealer in her own neighborhood. The dealer, Ace, is advertising his Snapchat drug dealing business with the phrase beating all tickets. Prices go hit the tell and get tapped in. And then he links the drug paraphernalia shop called ACOS on Telegram. Look at this. So this is the screenshot that Bridget reports to Snap. You see here you've got individual pucks. He's selling it, right? ACO shop beating all tickets. So she reports this to Snap and says, Oh, you got a drug dealer here. Snap responds. Check that out.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

This is three years ago.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

In October of 2022. And Snap responds. Thanks for reporting something in the app. It helps us protect the Snapchat community. Sorry, Snapchat doesn't protect anyone but Snapchat. We wanted to let you know we looked into your report and have found it does not violate our community guidelines. Thanks for your report, Team Snapchat. This picture? Picture did not this did not.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

Okay, so we're looking at stack of cash, uh, vape, and some kind of individual pucks.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

I don't see we don't even you and I don't even know what that is. It could be marijuana, I don't know. And this beating all tickets, prices go hit the telly and get tapped in ACO shop and it links to a telegraph. So she reports this guy and Snap says, this is in October of 2022. Snap says this does not violate our community guidelines. Here's one. So in February, okay, so in February 2023, right, she finds another dealer on Snapchat. He's broadcasting where he's gonna be. She attempts to alert law enforcement about an active post and they say there's nothing they can do. They tell her to report the dealer to Snap. She does it one week later. On February 24th, 2023, she reports GasCT860, who's actively selling drugs at the time of the report. Snap responds at 2:41 p.m. Central, the same day, confirms the post did in fact violate its community standards. However, as of 6 25 a.m. the next morning, the account's still active. So in this case, Snap says, Oh yeah, this does violate, right? And she says, account holders selling drugs on your platform. And boom, here you go, actively selling. Snap responds back. Thanks for reporting something in the app. It helps us protect the Snapchat community. We wanted to let you know we have looked into your report. We have found it violates our community guidelines. Thanks for helping us keep Snapchat safe. As of April 2023, we haven't checked it since then. So this is when we filed this complaint. It is still active. In February 2023, she reports the dealer. Snapchat responds and says, Oh, we reviewed, and actually, yeah, this guy is violating the terms. And then they don't do a damn thing. It's insane. It's like Alice in Wonderland. Like, seriously, we've gone down the rabbit hole. This is what is happening? If you report them, they may tell you there's no violation. If you report them, they may tell you there is and still not do a damn thing. And meanwhile, these dealers are killing kids.

SPEAKER_02 33:03

But there's another mother whose story shows how far parents will go when every system fails them. Perla Mendoza's son Elijah died September 2020 from pills laced with fentanyl.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Perla, her son Elijah dies September 16, 2020. He thought he was getting a per cassette. The guy who sells to him is named Arnaldo. Months prior to when Elijah dies, Alex Neville, Amy's beautiful son, he dies, and it's a dealer named Mohammed. It turns out is the supplier for Arnaldo. So these are two Snapchat dealers in Southern California who are just prolific and they are selling all these drugs to all these kids. And Snap doesn't do anything when it happens with Mohammed and Alex dies a couple months later, kills Elijah.

SPEAKER_03 33:47

So over five years ago.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

So this is 2020, September. So we're looking at, yeah, five years in five years and what 11 days. Perla tries to get help. First of all, police have a hell of a time getting anything from Snap. They say they cooperate with law enforcement, but in Perla's case, in Elijah's case, they serve a warrant, and that was in, and I've got those documents here. They serve the warrant in October 2020, the search warrant for this drug dealer's account. The court signs it. Snap doesn't respond until four months later, so February 2021. And when Snap responds, so they wait four months and don't give them a damn thing. Instead, they object and say, Hey, you forgot to include this sentence. And law enforcement is saying, No, actually, I did. It's on a different page. It's there. It's compliant. But now four months have gone by. What's left? If anything, I'm showing you some text messages now. In November, so after sundi, she's texting the police and saying, Hey, have you heard from them? And police officer is texting her back and says, I'm waiting for the information from Snapchat. I've sent an email for an update from them and waiting for a reply. They should have sent something to me by now. He also says, I asked our homicide detectives how long Snapchat takes. They said it can take over a month. It's been three weeks. Then you fast forward a couple weeks and she's asking again any updates. He says, I'm still waiting for Snapchat. I have sent numerous emails and have received no response. I have tried calling, but there is no one to call. This is by design because Snapchat doesn't like dealing with police. I will keep trying and let you know when they respond to me. This is police saying they do this by design. So Perla then starts trying to report Arnaldo on the platform. She goes into Team Snapchat support and says, My son died after a drug dealer on Snapchat dropped off what my son believed to be Percocets. The pills were laced with fentanyl. The detective has been trying to get someone from Snapchat to respond to the search warrant has received no response. Help us bring light to this crime and stop the drug dealer from selling on Snapchat. Perla looks for customer service numbers. She looks for other ways to get Snap's attention. She lives near its corporate headquarters. And one day she goes to the physical offices. She's desperate to find someone and say, Hey, this is the dealer. Please stop him. He's killing, he killed my son, he's killing others. Instead, security says, Hey, you need to move your car. We're going to tow it. And she's like, You don't understand. I need to speak with someone. This is really important. He says, Yeah, you have to have an appointment. She says, How do I do it? He said, We're not a retail store. You don't get an appointment, right? So I'm going to tow your car if you don't move it. You have to have an appointment to talk to someone, but you can't have an appointment. So she is literally banging on the door, trying to get help. This dealer is out there. So what Perla does is she actually friends this dealer on Snapchat and she starts following him. She puts herself in harm's way because all she can think about every time she sees him post up is that's someone else's baby who might be dying today. And it's so traumatic. And she's putting herself in harm's way. She's tracking this guy. She's calling every time he posts up in a different area. It's all out for the world to see. And here's some images you can see here. These are actual screenshots from the dealer who killed her son. Perla's taking screenshots where he's like, hey, look at these pills. I'm posting up. Look at all these pills. I'm posting up at the hotel. Here's one where he's gassing up his car. He says, place an order. I'll be on the road at six, pickups for now, still doing deals. Tell me how much you got and I'll work with you. Here's him on the Snap Map feature, right? So this is why dealers love Snapchat. I'm going to be around the corner at six o'clock. I've talked to a number of kids with the dealers, made sure if they didn't have a map on, the dealer would say, You need to turn it on so I know where you are. And think about how many. We see this not just with drugs, but with sex torsion and sexual abuse. A young woman who met someone on Snap and did not realize that she had the Snap map on, did not realize what that meant. She's a kid. And the predator asked for something. She said no. And he said, I know where you live. Here's your home address. And if you don't do it, I'm going to come kill your mother and rape you. And this is a kid who is terrified. We have actually a number of instances of people we've met, another woman whose daughter, a predator, found her at home that way and came and raped her. And how do you as a parent, when you're saying yes to Snapchat, which looks like a kid's app, it's marketed as a kid's app, there's no reason to think it's not a kid's app. In what world does a parent realize this app's actually going to give out your home address? This is part of the design. She tracks this guy every time he posts, and ultimately he does get arrested, not for her son's murder, but for others. Law enforcement eventually says, Look, if you hadn't done this, we wouldn't have gotten this guy. Snap didn't do a damn thing.

SPEAKER_03 38:18

In fact, at one point it's in the law enforcement doesn't have the resources to do what she did.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

They don't have the resources, but also it's even worse than that. She had an existing Snapchat account, changed her Snapchat name, and then connected with this guy. Um, law enforcement, like the way Snapchat is set up, you have markers of authenticity. You have scores, you have streaks, you have all these things that tell a dealer you're not a police officer. Police officers would literally have to sit there and pretend to be a kid or an adult Snapchat user, and then they'd have to use Snapchat for months. They would have to spend hours to make it look authentic. That is part of the design, and that's part of what makes it dangerous. You look like law enforcement. If you jump in and you have none of the telltale signs of, yeah, I'm legit. This is, and we put this in the public record at some point. And as we move forward in discovery and trial, this will come out. It is our understanding, and we have been informed that in I want to say 2021, it could have been early 2022, there were law enforcement at a conversation with Snap and said, hey, this is a real problem, the way your platform is designed. We cannot get on there and protect kids because dealers, we don't have points, we don't have scores. Snap said no.

unknown 39:24

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Snap said, no. If we find a fake account, we'll take it down. And now combine that with the Bitmojis, where it is these little avatars, these cartoons. I've spoken to numerous young people who say, I figured out on Instagram quicker when it was a predator. I could see the pictures and I was like, I don't know this person. As I got older, it was easier for me to realize what was happening. On Snap, it was a lot harder because it it looked like a little cartoon. It looked harmless. And Snap says, This is your friend. It uses the word friends, these are your friends. We only connect to you if this is your friend.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

When I pulled 750 pages of public records from local law enforcement, I found something that stopped me. A case involving Snapchat that never made the news. Not a single article, complete media silence. Adult men were using Snapchat to digitally traffic young girls. The scheme was horrifyingly simple. Connect with minors on Snapchat. Offer them money through Cash App for pictures. More money to meet in person. And it never made the news. Think about that. A child sex trafficking ring operating on Snapchat in my own city and complete media blackout. How many more cases like this never see the light of day? When these crimes involve minors, victims can't be named. Families don't hold press conferences. There's no public advocacy because the shame and trauma are too deep, which means the public never knows the scale of what's happening. So I asked Laura straight out, how often are these sex crimes involving minors actually happening on these platforms?

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Millions. I wish I were exaggerating. This is part and parcel of what Snapchat is. Ask any teen, what's the app where all the drugs are, Snapchat? Ask any young teen girl. I've spoken with hundreds of teen girls, and I have yet to meet one who has not gotten a dick pic on Snapchat. Not because they've asked for it, not because they looked for it. Teen girls will tell you when I open the account, I get flooded with it. I get contacted by strangers. It's weird, right? It's like they're pushing my dad out. That's exactly what they're doing now. I've spoken with dozens of adult women who opened Snap and said, I never had that experience. And it's not just Snap, it's Instagram too. I've spoken with a number of young adults who actually, and when they realize this, it's oh my God, actually things started changing around age 16 to 18. I stopped getting all of the reach outs. On a platform like Snap, you can't even say that's because the predators could see your picture and you weren't a kid anymore. No, that's not true. It's an avatar, it's a bit moji. They couldn't see my picture. That's the whole point of Snapchat.

SPEAKER_02 41:54

So to children, right? It knows who a child is.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

It being Snap, it being the humans who are programming this, right? They are programming for engagement, which means if you break it down, if I'm a 40-year-old predator and Snap and Meta are sending me 40-year-old women, I stop using their platform. That's not what I'm there for. And they know that based on I engage really well with 13-year-old girls. I'm a 40-year-old man and I engage all the time. If you send me a 13-year-old girl, I'll be on there. And 13-year-old girls engage with me. And they're programming. Now, this isn't a human being sitting there being like, I want a kid to be sexually abused. But it's not much different when you have human beings who are programming it and saying, we don't care. We want engagement first. Oh, but what about these safety issues? You don't fix anything if it's going to bring down engagement. Do they know that their programming decisions are harming children? Yes, they absolutely do. There's no way they can't. At this point, there's no way they do not know that their programming decisions, their conscious decision to prioritize engagement over the health and safety of vulnerable users, of children, of everyone. There's no way that they don't know that they are harming kids. And that, and when we when you meet with hundreds of kids, and like, yeah, that's just how Instagram and Snapchat work. This is a direct quote from a young woman. Snapchat has a feature where you can screenshot the chat and send it to them and say if this person is harassing you. Usually when people would send me pics out of nowhere, I would report them, but nothing ever happened. It would never stop. The same people messaging me and Snapchat never emailed me or got back. There was no point. I realized I'm on my own. There's nothing this company is going to do to help. She was 12 when she was doing that. This document came out in a piece of litigation in the last year. This document came out and made it in the public record. Maybe an AG complaint. Maybe New Mexico. They're saying these are Snap records. Here you have a situation where, and I'm quoting from this complaint, Snap employees pointed to a quote from a Snapchat document. Snap employees pointed to a case where an Account had 75 different reports against it since October 2021 mentioning nudes, minors, and extortion, yet the account was still active. This is from an internal Snapchat document. That's why I say it's not that people don't care, it's that they don't believe it until they see it. If you told someone this, they would think you were crazy. In no world does a company allow a user, an account, to have been reported 75 times for nudes, miners, and extortion for serious crimes, serious bad stuff, and then doesn't do a goddamn thing.

SPEAKER_02 44:43

75 different people saw something so disturbing they took the time to report it. The reports explicitly mentioned miners being exploited. Snapchat's own employees documented this. And they left the account running. This isn't incompetence. This isn't moving fast and breaking things. This is seeing a predator documenting the predation and choosing to let it continue because taking it down might hurt engagement metrics. Laura's right, there's no other word for it but sociopathic.

SPEAKER_00 45:19

It's not that parents don't care, it's that they don't know and they cannot fathom. They don't know, they can't believe it. In this work over the last several years, I will come across bits of data where I literally have to show people. Your brain will not wrap itself around what I'm saying. You have to see it to believe it. Earlier today, we were talking about education and how things aren't gonna change until we educate. It's not just this broad sense of education. Because these tech companies like to say, get online with your kids, teach them how to use these products. They want you to use these products. That's not digital literacy until these products are safe. The key is it's not just education. These products are in our homes. If this hadn't happened to you, you might struggle to believe it because it's so terrible. These companies are preying on our kids by design. They've been doing it for years. They're in our classrooms. The schools are telling parents, you don't have a choice, this is curriculum. We've been told this is good for your kids. It's educational, it's community building. In what world would we have conceived that a corporation that could create these products, give them out for free? It's the Trojan horse, right? They've made them a part of our lives. And then all of a sudden, people are like, wait a sec, maybe these are actually killing kids. Maybe these are dangerous. Maybe these cigarettes actually can cause cancer. How many years did it take for people to accept the fact that cigarettes were not good for you because they were in your homes? Only these are in your homes with your kids. So I guess all of that is just to say people are struggling to believe it.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

Parents don't know because powerful companies spend millions making sure they don't know. When you Google is Snapchat safe for my teen, you find reassuring safety centers and parental guides. You don't find the 75 reports for nudes, minors, and extortion. You don't find the dealer who operated for weeks with Snapchat's knowledge. You don't find the police testimonies about unanswered warrants. You find what they want you to find. Over the next nine episodes, we're going to trace how we got here. How corporations learned to shape not just what we buy, but what we believe. How they built legal fortresses that make them untouchable. How they turned our children into products and convinced us it was our fault when the product breaks. We'll take you inside the tech conferences where they literally teach courses on creating addiction. We'll follow the money from corporate treasuries through shell organizations to the mysteriously funded campaigns that kill child safety laws. We'll show you the PAL memos blueprint for corporate dominance and how tech companies are its ultimate expression. We'll expose the legal shield, Section 230, arbitration clauses, terms of service that create a reality where a company can connect your child to a drug dealer, destroy the evidence, and face no consequences. And we'll show you exactly how they convince society to blame parents instead of platforms, how they've made us the airbags in a car they designed without brakes. The truth is, parents don't know because there's a hundred-year-old machine designed to keep them from knowing. But once you see the machine, really see it, you can't unsee it. And maybe finally we can start taking it apart.

SPEAKER_00 48:36

You mentioned like the relationship that I have with you parents, and in a real way, like for me, I came into this work because when I read Selena Rodriguez's complaint that Matt was working on, I was at a firm at the time, I read about that beautiful little girl who took her life on Snapchat and her medical records, her school records. This is a kid that was thriving until that iPad came into the picture, and then everything goes to hell. And then I watched a documentary where these designers were like, Oh, I don't let my kids use these products. You didn't know. They lied. You had no way of knowing. I work with parents who said no, always. You couldn't have stopped. It's designed to get around parental authority. You all are fighting after the fact. For me, I see this happening, right? This is my four little kids. I'm fighting for their lives. You mention heroes a lot, and we talk about superhuman and stuff. There's a reason I always say you parents are the real heroes. When I'm in this fight, I'm trying to lift a car off my kids. That's what parents have been doing since the beginning of time. You have experienced the most unimaginable thing, and you had a choice. You could have gone to bed, pulled the covers up, and just pretended nothing happened. Instead, you're out there lifting cars off other people's kids. That's superhuman strength. Right? It's not how it should be. It's not okay, it never will be. But it's a purpose. I think Avery, all these kids have a terrible sense of self-preservation, but their sense of justice, we could all learn from it. When kids see somebody being harmed, you couldn't stop them if you tried. And when we go through this, it's horrible and it's hard. But I see these kids with us, fighting with us. These kids are fighting like hell for other kids. And that's it's intense. These kids that we've lost, they can't. This has become their norm. But but now they're fighting with us.

SPEAKER_02 50:32

The platforms want us at our most primitive. All reaction, no reflection. They're literally trying to shut down our prefrontal cortex, the part that makes us human. Every infinite scroll, every variable reward, every phantom notification. Designed to bypass thinking and trigger pure reaction. It's not an accident, it's science. In episode two, we'll dissect that science, show you exactly how they hack the mind and why a child's developing brain can't fight back. But first, remember this. They know exactly what they're doing. They spend millions to hide it. The gap between those two stacks of paper, that's where children like Avery are buried.