Family members of the 10 Black people fatally shot in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in 2022 and their lawyers announced a wrongful death lawsuit Wednesday (July 12) against social media companies, gun retailers and others.

The attorneys allege that Payton Gendron, the then 18-year-old white gunman who live streamed his attack, was radicalized on the internet. Social media giants Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram; and Google, which owns YouTube are among the high-profile defendants.

Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump said during the press conference announcement that the social media company either knew or should have known that their algorithms could prompt racists to commit violent acts, adding that the legal team filed a “landmark lawsuit.”

“Even though Payton Gendron fired the weapon that killed all their loved ones and critically injured others, there were many people who helped him load the gun,” Crump said at the live streamed press conference at Elim Christian Fellowship church in Buffalo, surrounded by the victims’ family members and co-counsel.

“It is our objective, as we said previously, to make sure that everybody who helped load the gun is held to account. They were conspirators, even if they don’t want to admit it.”

On May 14, 2022, Gedron entered the Tops Friendly Markets with a military-style assault rifle wearing tactical gear and opened fire. Investigators said Gedron, a Conklin, N.Y., researched the local demographics and chose that supermarket to kill as many Black people as possible.

Prosecutors said he espoused the “Great Replacement” theory, which is the false belief that a secret political group is working to replace White Americans with non-White people through interracial marriage, immigration, and inevitable violence. Gedron killed 10 people and injured three others. Eleven of the victims were Black. Two were White.

“Let's be clear, highlighted by the fact that we are in a church, this is a reckoning for Meta, for Amazon, for Twitch, for Google, for YouTube, for vintage firearms, for the defendants that we've named. We'll see you in court, and you will be held accountable,” co-counsel Diandra Zimmermann said at the press conference.

The Buffalo News reports that the lawsuit was filed in the New York State Supreme Court and accuses the social media companies of feeding Gendron "a steady stream of racist and white supremacist propaganda and falsehoods."

"By his own admission, Gendron, a vulnerable teenager, was not racist until he became addicted to social media apps and was lured, unsuspectingly, into a psychological vortex by defective social media applications designed, marketed and pushed out by social media defendants," the lawsuit alleges.

Gedron pleaded guilty in November to 15 counts, including domestic terrorism motivated by hate, murder, and attempted murder. A judge sentenced him in February to life in prison without the possibility of parole.