• Snapchat’s current CEO is facing questions about his company’s speed filter as part of a lawsuit stemming from a 2015 high-speed crash in Georgia.
  • Christal McGee was driving at 107 miles per hour when she hit Wentworth Maynard, causing him permanent brain damage.
  • In 2021, Snapchat retired a controversial filter that overlaid your speed on what your phone’s camera saw.

The company behind social media app Snapchat is reeling from the negative press surrounding its controversial Speed ​​Filter, despite scrapping the feature in 2021. Last week, a Georgia judge ruled that Snapchat’s current CEO, Evan Spiegel, must answer questions in a lawsuit against a woman who critically injured the driver of another car in a high-speed crash while allegedly using the app.

Snapchat’s speed filter was a digital speedometer overlaid on any image a user’s smartphone camera saw. The filter was introduced in 2013 and, unsurprisingly, quickly became used not only by car passengers but also by drivers, who shared photos showing how many miles per hour they managed to squeeze out of their cars.

Related: Study Finds Deadly Rise in Distracted Driving

It was Christal McGee who was accused of doing just that in September 2015, when she slammed her Mercedes into Karen and Wentworth Maynard’s SUV. The Wentworths were pulling out of their apartment complex on Tara Boulevard in Spalding County, where the speed limit is 55 miles per hour (89 km/h), when they were struck by McGee’s car, WSB-TV 2 reports.

Accident reconstruction experts estimate that McGee was going 107 miles per hour (172 km/h) at the time of collision, and Wentworth’s lawsuit alleges that McGee told three passengers she would try to reach triple-digit speeds and then post the result on Snapchat.

Wentworth Maynard fell into a coma in the crash, spent five weeks in intensive care and now has permanent brain damage, his lawyer said Channel 2 Action News in 2016. Now the couple is suing Snapchat for what they say is the company’s role in the tragedy.

The judge presiding over the Spalding County case wants to hear from Spiegel because he is one of two company employees who played a role in developing the Speed ​​Filter concept and is the person responsible for its removal in 2021. Snapchat alleges that McGee, who was just 19 at the time of the accident, ignored warnings on the app that told users not to take photos and drive at the same time.