Tim Wu, The New York Times ; Social Media Isn’t Just Speech. It’s Also a Defective, Hazardous Product.
"For two decades now, social media companies have been virtually untouchable, profitably floating above accusations that they normalize propaganda, addict children and degrade our character. Legally and politically, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have been protected by an idea that they and others have promoted: that they are not just innovative technologies but also speech platforms, so that imposing any limits on them would amount to both censorship and a drag on technological progress.
That protection is finally starting to weaken, thanks to a growing realization that social media is also a matter of public health. Seen this way, social media appears as something less newfangled and more familiar: a defective, hazardous product. The current trial of Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube in Los Angeles Superior Court, in which a 20-year-old woman has accused the platforms of designing their products in ways that harmed her mental and physical health, is the clearest sign of this shift.
The case, in which closing arguments were made on Thursday, is the first of many lawsuits brought by thousands of young people, school districts and state attorneys general against companies like Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok. The plaintiffs in these cases do not accuse the companies merely of serving up bad content to young people; they argue that the very design of social media is intentionally engineered to create compulsions and habits of overuse, regardless of the content provided."
