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Snap, Inc., introduced a speed filter in 2013 as a way for users to document how fast they were driving when a particular video was taken. Over the following years, there were many fatal crashes that involved the speed filter in one way or another, leading to some young Snapchat users driving gamification. In May, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that parents of young men who died in an accident where a speed filter was used just before impact could sue Snap, Inc. This month, the feature was removed.
In what sounds like the origin story of quite a few lawsuits, the company behind the popular Snapchat app finally removed the “speed filter” feature from its app this week, which reportedly displays speed. to which a person was moving when a Snap video was taken. NPR was the first to report the removal of the feature, which was introduced in 2013. A representative from Snap, Inc., told NPR this week that the speed filter “is hardly used by Snapchatters… And in light of that, we’re deleting it altogether. ” But there’s another legal reason why the tech company may have decided that now is the time to take something that has been around for eight years.
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Several lawsuits have been filed against Snapchat for the Speed Filter feature over the years, and information about people, including many teenagers, who have died or been injured in accidents that somehow involve the filter. are not hard to find. To name just a few examples: A woman died in a Mini Cooper traveling at 106 mph in March 2018. Three young women died in a fire after a Camaro crashed after going over 70 miles on time in February 2016. A man driving a Volkswagen Golf was killed himself and four others after driving at least 115.6 mph in October 2016.
In all of these cases, and many more, it is believed that Snapchat’s speed filter played a role in how quickly drivers were going before they crashed. Until the vehicles crashed, some people using the Speed Filter to record high speed levels seemed to view it as a game to drive beyond their own abilities. Describing the Golf’s Snapchat video, a Tampa Bay Times article said, “A woman can be heard laughing during the 10-second clip, apparently filmed from the passenger seat.”
Snapchat’s response to incidents like these in the past has been to say that the company does not approve of irresponsible driving and causes the app to display a “do not slam and drive” warning when driving. use of the speed filter. This isn’t helpful when a passenger is the one filming, and more recently Snapchat has reduced the top speed the app would show to 35mph.
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Things changed in May, when a three-judge panel from the U.S. Ninth Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of three young men who died in a crash in Wisconsin while using a speed filter to record speeds of up to 123 mph have the right to sue Snapchat. NPR called the move a “surprise move” because it failed to allow Snapchat to hide behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which tech companies often rely on to not be held responsible for this. that users post on their sites. The Ninth Circuit judges said that because the speed filter is an app feature and not user content, Section 230 does not protect Snapchat.
The problem, said the Ninth Circuit, is the inherent design of the app, which rewards users with “trophies, streaks and social recognition” based on the snaps they send, the court wrote. The problem is, the app doesn’t specifically tell users how to earn these achievements. “A lot of Snapchat users suspect, if not ‘really believe’, that Snapchat will reward them for” recording a speed of 100 mph or more [s]nap “using the speed filter. According to the complainants, ‘[t]This is a game for Snap and many of its users, the goal being to hit 100mph, take a photo or video with the speed filter, and then share the Snap at 100mph on Snapchat. ‘”
The court said last month that, at the very least, Snapchat should have known that a reward system like this made young drivers drive at speeds unsafe for them, but it took no action to remove this prompt from the app. After leaving the feature in place for eight years, it only took Snap a month to remove the feature after the court ruling.
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