Snapchat CEO Faces Questions In Lawsuit Over 107 MPH Crash Involving Snapchat’s Speed Filter

  • Snapchat’s current CEO must answer questions about his company’s speed filter as part of a lawsuit into a high-speed 2015 crash in Georgia.
  • Christal McGee was travelling at 107 mph when she smashed into Wentworth Maynard, leaving him with a permanent brain injury.
  • Snapchat withdrew the controversial filter, which superimposes your speed over what the phone’s camera sees, in 2021.

The company behind social media world’s Snapchat can’t shake the bad publicity resulting from a controversial Speed Filter, even though it withdrew the function in 2021. Last week a Judge in Georgia, ruled that Snapchat’s current CEO, Evan Spiegel, must face questions in a lawsuit brought against a woman who badly injured the driver of another car in a high-speed crash while allegedly using the app.

Snapchat’s Speed Filter was a digital speedometer superimposed on whatever image the user’s smartphone camera was seeing. The filter was introduced in 2013 and unsurprisingly it quickly found itself being used not only by passengers in cars, but drivers too, who shared images of how many mph they’d coaxed out of their cars.

Related: Study Finds Deadly Rise In Distracted Driving

That’s what Christal McGee is accused of doing in September 2015 when she smashed her Mercedes into Karen and Wentworth Maynard’s SUV. The Wentworths had turned out of their apartment complex onto Tara Boulevard in Spalding County, which is a 55 mph (89 kmh) zone, when they were struck by McGee’s car, WSB-TV 2 reports.

Crash reconstruction experts estimate that McGee was travelling at 107 mph (172 kmh) at the time of the collision, and the Wentworth’s suit alleges that McGee told her three passengers that she was going to try to hit three figures then post the result on Snapchat.

Wentworth Maynard was left in a coma by the crash, spent five weeks in intensive care and now has a permanent brain injury, his lawyer told Channel 2 Action News in 2016. And now the couple is suing Snapchat for what it claims is the social media company’s part in the tragedy.

The judge in the case in Spalding County wants to hear from Spiegel because he’s one of only two employees left at the firm who played a role in the Speed Filter’s conception and is the person responsible for removing it in 2021. Snapchat says McGee, who was just 19 at the time of the accident, ignored the warnings on the app telling users not to snap and drive at the same time.


The Auto World

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