A group of big tech firms is fighting to stop roughly 3,000 youth safety lawsuits from moving forward, and they just lost a critical procedural battle in court.
The lawsuits, brought by attorneys general and families, allege that Meta, Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snap knew their products were addictive to children and teens and harmful to their mental health, but continued marketing them to young users for profit.
The tech companies tried to appeal against a federal court ruling that allowed those involved to file their lawsuits in court. They argued in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that a linchpin US law meant they couldn’t be sued.
That law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, created 30 years ago. It says that platforms cannot be held responsible for things that their users post online. For years, social media companies treated it like a bulletproof vest. When users posted something bad, the company running it could claim it was the messenger, not the author.
That defense doesn’t seem to be working here. On August 10, the court ruled that Section 230 “provides a defense to liability, not immunity from lawsuits, so the appeal was premature.” This case revolves not so much around what people posted online as how the tech companies allegedly engineered their platforms to present that content to users.
The Nebraska Law Review explains several of the techniques the lawsuits say make these platforms more engaging, and potentially more addictive.
The article explains how certain interactions on these platforms can trigger dopamine release. Those interactions could be as simple as someone responding to your message or liking one of your photos. Dopamine plays an important role in the brain’s reward system.
The NLR article describes techniques such as making those rewards unpredictable, which encourages people to keep checking their accounts habitually. Interface features like the infinite scroll are also designed to keep you on the dopamine train. The paper cites the inventor of that particular idea, who describes it as:
“taking [behavioral] cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface.”
Anyone who’s spent too long in bed doomscrolling can relate.
The 9th Circuit’s denial of the appeal is procedurally narrow but strategically enormous. Section 230 is a defense you argue at trial, not a wall that keeps plaintiffs off the courthouse steps. The Third Circuit has gone further, ruling that Section 230 “does not provide immunity to platforms if they face tort lawsuits over injury caused by the algorithms they design.”
The algorithm, in other words, is the product. The product can be defective.
Behind those cases sits a growing pile of discovery material that plaintiffs argue sheds light on how the platforms approached user engagement, and a New Mexico judgment against Meta earlier this month in a case exploring similar complaints. That judgment now totals $942 million because the judge added $567 million onto the original amount, finding Meta had:
“created a public nuisance through its platform design.”
What discovery keeps dragging out
Discovery in these cases has already been unkind to Meta. A 2016 email attributed to Mark Zuckerberg said that alerting parents to teens’ live videos would “probably ruin the product from the start”. A recent court filing alleged that staff at social media giants have compared their own platforms to drugs, with one Meta employee writing that:
“we’re basically pushers.”
Snap looks no better. By late 2022, Snap employees were fielding roughly 10,000 sextortion reports per month, according to a filing in the New Mexico case. An internal investigation concluded that 70% of victims never reported abuse because “they knew no action would be taken by Snap; indeed, of the 30% that did report, none were addressed.”
That number surfaced through New Mexico’s unredacted complaint, not through any Snap disclosure.
Safety features that don’t work
If executives knew, the fixes should have followed. Mostly they didn’t. Researchers at NYU and Northeastern University tested 86 youth safety features and found 51 failed their tests. Snapchat’s failure rate was 73%, Instagram’s 66%, YouTube’s 55% and TikTok’s 50%. Nine features couldn’t even be triggered when the researchers tried. The researchers reported that every cyberbullying safeguard they tested failed.
The bypasses were quick to find. Type “eating disorder” into Instagram search and autocomplete politely offers the deliberate misspellings that pro-eating-disorder communities use to duck the platform’s own blocklist. Safety, in that instance, was doing the opposite of safety.
What parents can do now
Don’t assume in-app safety features work exactly as advertised. If your child uses social media, test the settings yourself and confirm they’re doing what you expect.
Set up a test account and check that each setting blocks what it claims to block. And think about the amount of social media time you want to grant your children, or whether you want to let them use it at all. Either way, it begins with an honest family conversation.
If your child is being harassed by people they know online, encourage them to tell you immediately. Save evidence, block and report the accounts where appropriate, and don’t hesitate to involve the school or law enforcement if the harassment includes threats, blackmail, or sexual exploitation.
You can also report sextortion to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline directly, rather than trusting a platform’s own reporting queue.
Check back here for more details on the federal case. The next several months will decide whether the biggest platforms in history get rewritten by juries, or whether they settle their way out one confidential check at a time.
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