BUFFALO, N.Y. — It’s been almost two years since Wayne Jones lost his mother, Celestine Chaney, and the reason it happened still isn’t clear to him.
On May 14, 2022, he got the news. His mother was one of the 10 shot and killed in the 5/14 racist massacre that occurred at Tops on Jefferson Ave.
But Jones didn't find out from authorities.
“My daughter calls me on the phone, and she says, ‘OK, dad, they got some videos and some pictures on Facebook. It looks like grandma,’ ” Jones said.
Chaney was a single mother. Wayne described her as strong, independent and feisty. She was at Tops that day to pick up strawberry shortcake, which was her favorite.
But Jones’ lasting image of his mother is a video he saw of her on social media.
“I watched them kill her,” he said. “He shot her twice. Well, he reloaded and shot her again. It’s unreal, and it never goes away.”
According to a U.S. law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, there’s no way to hold social media platforms accountable for what Wayne saw. The law protects them from being held liable for the content posted on their sites by third-party users.
But Buffalo-based attorney John Elmore believes there’s a way to hold them accountable for why he saw it.
“We are not suing the social media platforms at all for content,” Elmore said. “We’re suing them based upon manufacturing design.”
Elmore filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Tops families last May against a handful of different social media companies like Meta and Discord for how their algorithms contributed to the events of the 5/14 massacre.
A manifesto written by the shooter Payton Gendron ahead of the shooting shows every action of that day from the weapon he chose to the racist ideology behind his actions can be tied back to what he learned on social media platforms.
He wrote: “I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom … There I learned through infographics … and memes that the White race is dying out.”
“The longer he stayed on it, the more stuff kept getting fed to him,” Elmore said. “It's our belief that this mass shooting would have never happened but for Gendron and getting addicted to social media during the pandemic.”
The social media platforms made a push to get the lawsuit dismissed, but on Monday, a State Supreme Court judge in Erie County denied the motion, allowing it to proceed.
The 5/14 massacre is just one example of the impact social media platforms and their algorithms can have on crimes. Platforms like TikTok have provided a home for trends like the Kia Challenge to go viral, physically showing how to steal cars and get away with it. It has even led to an increase in car thefts in Western New York over the last year.
An internal analysis from Reddit found that 40,000 pieces of hateful content are posted on the platform every day and that 78% of it goes unreported.
Erie County district attorney John Flynn said he sees both sides of social media’s impact.
“You have two polar opposite things here that are clashing,” Flynn said. “I believe they need to be held accountable for certain things that they do. But on the other hand … social media is a platform where we in law enforcement can go to catch criminals.”
Jones understands that argument but can’t fully overlook the way these platforms have changed his life, saying he feels without them, that his mother may still be alive today.
2 On Your Side reached out to those social media platforms and was essentially given the same message from all of them, expressing their deepest sympathies for the victims’ families and that they’re working to reduce the spread of hateful content, but saying nothing about changing the actual algorithms themselves.
Until something does change, Wayne is still left trying to determine the meaning behind his mother’s death — and hoping that it wasn’t just for a trip to the grocery store for some strawberry shortcake.