Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers

Their kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing::Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers

  • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
    204·
    9 months ago

    Being around teenagers in the last decade pretty much leads to this conclusion.

    The number of people I knew who didn’t do some kind of drugs in high school (grad 2017) was lower than the number that did, and I went to the known “upper middle class white people” school.

    This day and age has led to teens increasingly seek escapism and other, less healthy coping mechanisms

    • TurnItOff_OnAgain@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      9 months ago

      I work in K12. The amount of kids who are trying drugs at a younger age is massively higher than when I was in high school 20 years ago.

      • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
        143·
        9 months ago

        Yep. It’s crazy and not in a good way. 20 years ago the edgy kids smoked pot and not much worse. Now there’s kids literally doing cocaine in bathrooms of high schools. Pot is not only normalized, it’s almost encouraged among teenagers now.

        I’m a pothead to an extreme degree and I keep telling kids to not be like me.

        • isles@lemmy.worldEnglish
          17·
          9 months ago

          I had kids doing cocaine in our high school bathrooms 25 years ago, which is why anecdotes are unreliable for sense-making.

          • Peaty@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            6·
            9 months ago

            Exactly, the 1980s existed and some of us were alive then. I was too young to see coke in high school as I started in 1989 but older siblings absolutely did.

          • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            9 months ago

            Fair, and I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but I’d bet it was less people than are doing it now. What we can all probably agree on is that high schoolers doing coke is bad and we’d like that number to trend down, not up.

    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Um, there’s a whole lot to escape from, even if their home life is functional.

      We don’t get to totally neglect kids and parenting as a society, except to funnel them towards becoming an interchangeable, disposable laborer / soldier in some machine working towards a billionaire vanity project or into prison where their options are worse, and then not expect them to want to escape.

      If a teen is seeking out drug sales on Snapchat, that’s a symptom that something is amiss, whether or not the platform is being misused.