Parents sue Snap after 12-year-old daughter was raped by adult man she met on Snapchat …

Published  June 24, 2026 9:38 PM EDT article FILE – The Snapchat app displays on a mobile phone with Snap Inc. in the background. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The parents of a girl who was raped by an adult she met on Snapchat when she was 12 years old are suing the app’s parent company and their daughter’s attacker.  Dig deeper: The lawsuit was filed in a Missouri state court on Wednesday and claimed the social media company refused to disable dangerous features in its app or warn parents about potential harms it could cause.  12-year-old met 25-year-old man on Snapchat Timeline: The victim began using Snapchat in 2021 when she was 11 years old without her parents’ knowledge, according to the lawsuit. The app usually requires users to be 13 in order to sign up, but the victim couldn’t remember what birth date she used to bypass the minimum age requirements.  A year after signing up for Snapchat, the app allegedly recommended the victim, as well as other minors from nearby high schools, as friends to Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, an adult who was also using the app at the time.  Valentin-Rios had no real-life connections with
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