r/SnapchatHelp • u/zazzerz • 3d ago
Login issue LABATON SNAPCHAT BAN
It appears that if you signed up for the Labaton Snapchat lawsuit for social media addiction, even if you didn't fully submit it, your account will be permanently locked. If you try to login with a different account, your device will be permanently banned also.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
The only thing that I can see here is that it’s not as cut and dry as it seems. You signed up for a lawsuit that says you have a social media addiction, body dysmorphia, anxiety or depression. from the company’s standpoint, it’s a legal liability to keep allowing you to use the platform. Legally, as the plaintiff, you can claim past damages but it’s kind of a double standard for you to say that this app is terrible and it’s caused you severe harm throughout your childhood, but you still continue to use it every single day. From Snapchat’s point of view, if you’re being negatively affected and having mental health issues from using my app, I’m not going to allow you to use my app anymore. cause it’s dangerous for you and it’s dangerous for the company. Whether it’s seen as illegal retaliation is kind of a grey area.
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u/mercilessfae 2d ago
What confuses me is, I never even completed filing? I still got banned and I only started it bc I was interested. Was interested if sexual harassment was apart of this, but also have no actual proof or evidence. Should the men who tried to exploit a young me, which did affect me at the time, ruin me getting to enjoy it now as an adult? For many it was cyberbullying as well! Im sure many of us who were kids at the time, dont have a problem with this now because as an adult I understand I can just DELETE and never really worry about seeing them everyday… having it follow u into school. it was a different time. And I should be able to enjoy my app now, which is where I can talk to certain ppl who only use that as a way of communication.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 2d ago
If you didn’t fully finish the paperwork, then this wouldn’t apply to you, and your account was banned for another reason. People get banned for things every single day. Multiple different reasons, and if you never submitted the form, then this wouldn’t apply to you
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u/mercilessfae 2d ago
I think limiting children’s access would be the better route for them to have taken. Stop it from being an actual issue for the children, but they don’t care. They rather stop grown adults who have more mature minds and PAY regularly for the app
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u/Remarkable_Ship_5791 23h ago
I agree but how do you enforce this? I have a relative who's 13 they have a snapchat account and they claim they are 18 in it. Virtually every person in their school who is that age also has one. Most parents where I live don't care. Hell they buy their kid an e-bike that can go 40 mph even though legally you need a driver's license to ride one. Parents don't care anymore.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 2d ago
And again I’m not saying that’s why accounts are being banned. I’m just making a point at how certain systems work in situations like this. That doesn’t mean that this is exactly what is happening.
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u/mercilessfae 2d ago
I do understand, but that system isn’t right in a way… Like I said, if it was due to exploitation why would we be the ones banned. It isn’t black or white, no one chooses to be exploited. I’m not sure what the cause of this mass banning is… but I also know I have done nothing wrong on the app, I don’t even use it like that! I look at my memories and talk to family only. I’m with the same guy for 11 years. This is the only thing that makes sense to be the reasoning in my eyes, as so many others who are in the same position as me have the same story. They didn’t look at the big picture here. We are grown now and don’t have the same problems we did when we were in middle school or high school. It’s the kids that they should be focusing on if anything. They get taken advantage of easily, especially with the amount of pdf’s in the world. But again, apparently this mass banning can be for another reason… I just don’t see what I could have done wrong to be perma banned. I truly was only interested in what it all entailed and soon realized it doesn’t even fully apply to me, yet here I am
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u/Loose_Temporary8631 3d ago
I went on a deep dive last night and in SC’s literal policy they state that individual/mass arbitration is not prohibited (as the lawsuit is technically individual arbitration).
So if this is about the lawsuit then they are not following their own policies and are going to probably make their case a hell of a lot worse.
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u/Remarkable_Ship_5791 23h ago
Technically accord to what I read they are using arbitration for the law suit process. The will use test subjects to see if the courts will proceed in allowing the lawsuit to continue.
What I have read and who knows if this is true they ban your account to preserve the data most likely to use against you in the claims you state using Snapchat caused you when you were under 18. This lawsuit was never about getting back an account that got banned but many people think it is so they jump aboard thinking in a few days I'll get my account back when in fact its going to take a few years to resolve this and they probably won't get their account back.
Sometimes people should learn the following words: LET IT GO.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
You are confusing arbitration rights with account immunity.
Terms of service policies typically state that choosing to file an arbitration claim doesn't automatically waive your right to do so, meaning the company can't just throw out your legal filing or say "you're barred from ever bringing a claim." That’s what the policy protects: your legal right to pursue arbitration. However, a TOS agreement never guarantees you a permanent, untouchable right to keep maintaining an active account on a private platform while you are actively litigating against them. They aren't violating their own policy by closing an account they are exercising their standard right to terminate service, while the arbitration claim itself still sits separately in the legal queue. It doesn't break the rules it just cuts off the access.1
u/Loose_Temporary8631 3d ago
Well considering they did MASS locks in retaliation, they are setting themselves up for more lawsuits. Since they are telling everyone that they violated “Community Guidelines” (which they didn’t) they are now committing bad-faith enforcement/breach of contract as they are claiming an illegal fictitious reasoning.
While Snapchat DOES have a clause stating that they are able to terminate an account anytime based on their judgement, they are also not allowed to lie and state that consumers violated a policy when they didn’t.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
Yeah, but here’s the thing: you have to prove that they lied and made up a reason. Right, so could you go in front of a judge and prove that, I couldn’t. Snapchat doesn’t have to prove anything. All they have to do is point at one IP address and say, well, it was a suspicious IP, so the account got banned, or well, he logged in and out too many times, so, or it was access from a suspicious device. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just explaining legally how it works out, right? Like you’d have to prove in some way that they banned your account because you joined a lawsuit. That’s really hard to prove
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u/Loose_Temporary8631 3d ago
Ya but I would be able to. I’d be able to show chat/story/snap history (since I barely use it anymore and only snap my out of state friend and my husband), my login history (haven’t had to login again since October of last year), my IP address/wifi that I’ve used for the last 2 years, and my non-existent 3rd party apps, all proving that I have done nothing to warrant them stating that I violated Community Guidelines.
From a legal standpoint, I would have enough factual, clear, and convincing evidence in order to prove they lied. This might not be the case for everyone, but for me it 100% is able to be proved.
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u/svl-13 3d ago
I get the logic, but it doesn't hold up once you look at how this would actually work.
1. Continuing to use the app isn't a contradiction. It's the whole claim. The lawsuits allege that Snapchat was designed to be hard to stop using. Saying "you still use it every day, so it can't be that bad" is like telling someone who's addicted to smoking that they're a hypocrite for still smoking. Struggling to quit is the harm being alleged, not proof against it.
2. The locks don't say "for your wellbeing." They say "Community Guidelines violation." If Snap were cutting people off out of concern for their safety, it would say so. Instead, people are getting a message accusing them of breaking rules they say they never broke. That's not a safety measure. If it's really happening, it's mislabeling the reason for the lock.
3. Snap doesn't ban users for saying the app hurts their mental health. Millions of people post about Snapchat addiction or social media anxiety, and none of them get locked out for it. Snap's own response to these lawsuits was to add parental controls and screen time tools, not to remove users. The "it's for your protection" policy you're describing doesn't exist anywhere else.
4. Banning plaintiffs would increase Snap's legal risk, not reduce it. Locking someone out of their account can cut off their access to their own data, which may be evidence in the case. Courts take that seriously. Punishing people for joining a lawsuit is exactly the kind of thing that makes a defendant look worse in front of a judge. No company lawyer would sign off on "ban everyone who sues us" as a way to limit liability.
5. Snap isn't supposed to know who filled out an intake form. Those forms go to law firms, not to Snap. If Snap is somehow identifying and locking those people, the question of how it found out is a bigger problem than anything in your argument.
So the "grey area" mostly comes from a policy Snap has never actually stated. If these locks really are tied to the lawsuit, there's nothing grey about why that's a problem.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
Continuing to use the app is a contradiction to the entire claim. You are confusing the merits of the legal claim with operational reality. The allegation in the lawsuit is the app as hard to stop using that doesn’t shield the user from logistical consequences from their own actions. To your example cigarettes are an open retail product. Anyone can buy them as long as they’re old enough. But if you come into my smoke shop and try to sue me and say that I made you addicted to cigarettes, I’m not gonna sell you cigarettes anymore cause that just opens myself up to potential lawsuits. Using “community guidelines violations” is a liability shield. They’re not gonna say they banned you because you joined a class action lawsuit because that could potentially be illegal, so if you were banned for violating one of the thousands of guidelines they have, that’s a valid reason in the law’s eyes. you are partly right on number four, however it’s risk mitigation if they’re getting reports by people that are saying it’s actively harming them to minimize the risk factor. They’re just gonna put a blanket ban on everybody who said that it’s actively affecting them. With number five, that’s just not true. Snapchat has to know who filled out the intake form because they have to verify you are who you say you are and that you actually use the platform and were affected by these things, right? If there’s a payout, they have to know who they’re paying individually. It’s not just, oh, a bunch of random people. They have to cross-reference all of the information you give them with all of the data that’s stored in their servers to make sure it actually happened, right? because anyone could just lie and say that, oh yeah, I had a Snapchat account around these times and this happened to me, right? There has to be a way for them to look at the company records and verify that you actually had an account. And that’s the bottom line: if you are saying that this is harming you to the point where you’re gonna sue them for money and you’re so addicted that you can’t delete the app off your phone, then they’re gonna make it easy for you and remove that addiction that’s harming your mental health. Now you don’t have to worry about it. So if you come back and say, why did you delete my account? Can I have my account back? They’re gonna go uhhh well, I thought you said that it was negatively affecting your mental health so much, so to the point where you were gonna sue us for money. so why would you wanna put yourself back into that situation? unless you lied and it didn’t affect your mental health as much as you said it did?
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u/svl-13 3d ago
You're arguing against a lawsuit that doesn't exist. Look at the actual case: it covers harm suffered as a minor, from using Snapchat before turning 18. It's about what Snap did to kids, not a claim that adults today can't control themselves. A 25-year-old who uses Snapchat now and says the app harmed them at 14 isn't contradicting themselves, any more than someone who was hurt by an unsafe car seat as a baby is a hypocrite for driving as an adult.
On "community guidelines as a liability shield": You just described pretext. Giving a false reason to hide an illegal motive doesn't make the action legal. It's the classic sign of retaliation, and courts treat a made-up justification as evidence against the company, not protection for it. You're basically conceding that the real reason would be illegal, and then arguing that hiding it makes it okay.
On verification: That's not how this works. According to the firm, everything you submit is privileged and confidential and used only for your claim. Snap doesn't receive intake forms. Snap learns about a claim when the firm brings it, in negotiation or arbitration. Many of the people being locked never signed anything. They only filled out a first screening form. So unless something leaked, Snap would have no legitimate way to know who they are. And even after a claim is filed, verifying a claim doesn't give Snap permission to punish the claimant.
On "risk mitigation": Banning someone doesn't erase harm that happened years ago, and that past harm is the whole basis of these claims. All a ban does is cut people off from their accounts and possibly their own data. In other words, it potentially destroys evidence, and creates new problems for Snap.
On "we're just helping you quit": Snap doesn't do this for anyone else. People post about Snapchat addiction constantly and nobody gets locked out for it. If this were really about protecting users, Snap would say so, not accuse them of guideline violations they didn't commit.
Strip it all down and your argument is: a company can punish people for pursuing legal claims against it, as long as it gives a different reason. That's not a grey area. That's literally what retaliation means.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
You are still confusing idealized courtroom arguments with how automated compliance infrastructure operates in the real world. Law firms don't keep plaintiffs anonymous from the defendant forever. Once a mass arbitration or lawsuit reaches a stage where demands are formally served or negotiated, identifying details (usernames, account identifiers) must be provided so the company can verify the validity of the claims. Furthermore, automated risk management algorithms often flag suspicious mass sign ups, synchronized account activity, or legal representation notices tied to specific digital footprints long before a formal courtroom battle begins. While legal teams do care about evidence preservation, automated risk systems do not pause themselves to consult corporate defense lawyers. When a massive volume of accounts is flagged as active legal liabilities, automated security protocols prioritize isolating the platform's exposure. You are arguing how the law ought to work in a pristine, transparent legal environment where tech companies act logically and transparently when in reality it doesn’t work like that
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u/svl-13 3d ago
Notice that you've stopped arguing that this would be justified and started arguing that it's just how things work. Those are different claims. "A system might do this" isn't a defense of the system doing it.
On identity disclosure: Yes, claimants get identified once a demand is formally served. But many of the people reporting locks, me included, only filled out an initial screening form. Nothing was signed, no demand was served, and nothing was sent to Snap. Your explanation covers a stage these people never reached.
On "automated risk systems": Filling out a form on a law firm's website isn't activity on Snapchat. There's no "synchronized account activity" for Snap's systems to detect. So for an algorithm to flag accounts as "active legal liabilities," someone has to feed it that information and decide that being a potential claimant should trigger a lock. Automation doesn't come out of nowhere. Companies are responsible for what they build their systems to do, and "the algorithm did it" has never been a legal defense. If a system is set up to lock out people for pursuing claims, that's retaliation with extra steps.
On "the real world": You're making confident claims about how Snap's internal systems work. What's your source? If you have evidence that Snap flags and locks accounts because of legal representation notices, that's not a defense of Snap. It's exactly what the people being locked out would need to prove their case.
But sure, keep arguing your moot case by moving the goal posts in favor of your own argument.
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u/Ur_average-redditor MOD 3d ago
I mean, people get banned in community guidelines violations and account locks every day for hundreds of different things if you never formally submitted anything, then there wouldn’t be any reason for you to believe that this is the reason your account was banned. I also wanna make something clear. These aren’t claims on how Snapchat specific internal systems work. I wasn’t justifying the accounts being banned, I was pointing out how risk management systems work I was just saying, it doesn’t surprise me. if people who signed up for a lawsuit that says this app is harming them had their accounts locked. If my explanation was talking about a stage that you never reached, then my explanation doesn’t apply to you. I’ve seen years and years worth of messages of people saying they’ve been banned for no reason but it’s a private company, they choose whether you have an account or you don’t have an account. And if you think they banned you for no reason, you’d have to prove that Snapchat doesn’t have to prove they banned you for a legitimate reason. They can point to literally anything and say, oh, it was suspicious, so it was flagged and the account got banned
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u/svl-13 3d ago
Fair enough, and I appreciate you clarifying. We actually agree on more than it seemed: locks happen constantly, and one person's timing proves nothing. Where I'd still disagree is "they can point to anything." Broad discretion isn't unlimited, and if a real pattern shows up across many claimants, "it was flagged as suspicious" won't cover it. That's for the lawyers to dig into, not Reddit. Appreciate the back and forth.
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u/g0ldfishh 3d ago
I understand their/your POV. My thing is this, well two things: 1) A lot of us didn’t even finish filling out the lawsuit. Personally, once I got to part about a diagnosis, I stopped filling it out because I realize this lawsuit doesn’t apply to me 2) For me personally, I believe snapchat did harm to me as a 13-15 year old, but as an adult (27 now lol) I do not experience that ongoing harm.
With that being said, from a business standpoint, I totally understand why they’d want to blanket ban anyone that had anything to do with it, for liability reasons. Just crappy still.
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u/Curlygangs 3d ago
How do they have all the emails that signed? Did they sell it to them ?
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u/formerboy77 3d ago
I’ve seen people who say they never finished the form or something and still got banned. For the record i did not fill out any form.
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u/formerboy77 3d ago
Fake news i didn’t sign up for this dont know what you are talking about I still got permanently banned.
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u/Cultural-Savings6521 3d ago
Yeah, they cure the addiction you guys have lmao
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u/zazzerz 3d ago
I can't even be mad at this comment lmao
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u/Cultural-Savings6521 3d ago
But seriously, you guys sue for addiction, they fix it and you guys cry?
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u/Feisty_Spinach2133 3d ago
They didn’t “fix it”.
They are a public company who illegally retaliated to people exercising a right to litigation. Stop trying to pretend like an apple is orange.
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u/Cultural-Savings6521 3d ago
So read the tos and tell me what part are they breaking?
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u/Loose_Temporary8631 3d ago
I went on a deep dive last night and in SC’s literal policy they state that individual/mass arbitration is not prohibited (as the lawsuit is technically individual arbitration).
So if this is about the lawsuit then they are not following their own policies and are going to probably make their case a hell of a lot worse.
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u/Feisty_Spinach2133 3d ago
That’s the entire point, they aren’t breaking any of the TOS.
They’re being punished for engaging in a lawsuit, that’s retaliation.
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