Is social media really like tobacco? Meta and YouTube vow to appeal after losing the first round of this landmark litigation.
Like anyone who has kids in this day and age, I am sympathetic to families that must cope with youth depression and anxiety. But the notion that tech companies should be liable for those maladies because the kids and young adults blame their over-consumption of social media apps for their condition is crazy.
Nevertheless, as it goes with creative plaintiffs’ lawyers and their favored jackpot justice jurisdictions, a state jury in Los Angeles found Meta (the corporate owner of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) and YouTube (a Google subsidiary owned by Alphabet) liable for addicting a now 20-year-old woman to their content. The woman was referred to in the case by the initials K.G.M. (The New York Times reports that her first name is Kaley, she hales from Chico, Calif., and she claims to have begun using social media at age six.) The civil jury found damages of $6 million ($4.2 million imposed on Meta and $1.8 million on YouTube).
In my view, the case should not have proceeded. By enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Congress exercised its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce to preempt the states from regulating what social media users post — i.e., the content that people like K.G.M. consume. But the plaintiff’s lawyers argued, and the state court bought, a theory that the case was not about the content but about the processes by which the platforms present the content.
The theory was sufficiently edgy that the jury took over a week to reach a verdict in the trial, which had started in February.
K.G.M.’s allegations were analogous to the theory the plaintiffs’ bar used against tobacco companies. I believe the analogy is specious. Tobacco is a physically addictive, cancer-causing commodity, and there was substantial evidence that the companies knew about its dangers but understated them.
Still, once it was obvious the state court was going to let a jury decide whether deep-pocketed tech companies should pay for a plaintiff’s suffering, TikTok and Snap, which were also targeted, settled on terms that have not been disclosed.
I am not sugar-coating social media — indeed, I referred to it as a sewer just a couple of days ago. But the information age has changed life for the better in many ways. That would not have happened had the platforms not been shielded from liability for content, which in no way prevents lawsuits against people who produce offensive content if it fits some First Amendment exception.
In their quest to eviscerate any notion that human beings have agency and are responsible for the consequences of their actions (and responsible for guiding their children away from potentially harmful conduct), progressives and the plaintiffs’ bar would have all producers of legal products — cars, guns, social media companies, etc. — made liable for the illegal or otherwise harmful uses made of them by culpable third parties.
Is the world better off with tobacco companies financially crippled? Perhaps . . . although I always thought it mattered that people who smoked were well aware of the risks because the government compelled the companies to stamp warnings on their product. And how noteworthy it remains that lawmakers, for all their bombast, never actually criminalized the sale of cigarettes; after all, that would dry up a lucrative source of tax revenue.
Whatever you think of the tobacco precedent, however, we would surely not be better off without internet communication — or with that restriction made drastically more expensive and less accessible. No more than we’d have been better off if telephone usage had been made more expensive and limited by holding telecoms liable for the fact that bad people use their socially and financially valuable services for bad ends.
The companies held liable today are vowing to appeal. This is just the first round in what will be landmark litigation.