A jury just shattered Big Tech’s legal shield. Meta and YouTube: guilty of engineering addiction. This is social media’s tobacco moment — and AI is next.
Two industries in America have enjoyed near-total legal immunity for their products: gun manufacturers and social media platforms. Last week, it appeared that the legal shield for social media companies has been shattered.
Juries found Meta and YouTube guilty of harming users by deliberately engineering addiction, knowing the harm, and doing it anyway. Legal experts are calling it social media’s tobacco moment.
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Fordham University law professor Olivier Sylvain, a former senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission and author of Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control — and How We Can Take It Back.
He explains why these suits, in New Mexico and California, succeeded where previous attempts had failed to hold social media platforms accountable. At issue this time was not the content of online speech but the intrinsic machinery of social media — infinite scroll, autoplay, recommendation algorithms designed to hold attention at any cost.
Although federal law has long held that social media providers are not responsible for what users post, Sylvain says that evidence of the harms to young people have become impossible to ignore. Courts are finally asking the question Sylvain has been pressing for years: Are these commercial services engineered to monetize vulnerability — and thereby putting millions of users at mortal risk?
Sylvain’s real concern, however, is what comes next: artificial intelligence is being built on this same, flawed foundation. Same immunity claims, same reckless deployment. Until we settle whether these new products are subject to safety standards, he argues, we can’t address what new harms may be brewing.
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Jeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.
