Juries coming for Big Tech, but here’s a better fix for social media woes | Opinion

Big Tech and its social media impact have provided a steady stream of social and ethical challenges that we all have to navigate, as parents, teachers or simply individuals trying to enjoy the benefits of such technology while avoiding its dangers.

Now, social media companies are preparing to face challenges of their own: lawsuits following a landmark verdict from a Los Angeles jury that awarded millions March 25 to a sympathetic plaintiff, a young woman who professed childhood addictions to Facebook, YouTube and other social media apps.

The defendants, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and Google/Alphabet (owner of YouTube), argued that they are merely purveyors of content and that the proper guardrails against addiction are individual responsibility and, in the case of children, parental oversight.

They are not wrong about that. But social media content is not the same as a book on a shelf or even the countless websites we might run across. By their own admission, social media platforms are like a library that keeps delivering unsolicited material to your door based on what it has learned about your tastes and passions.

Driven to keep users riveted, apps load scrolling content designed to maximize screen time, deliver constant notifications to lure back any wandering eyes, and inject elements crafted to elicit emotions ranging from delight to rage — whatever keeps people coming back.

Can app users limit themselves, or is it like Big Tobacco?

There is a simple solution to unhealthy consumption: self-imposed limits. But the introduction of the concept of addiction leads to a deeper debate. Is social media content like tobacco, a product designed to hook consumers for additional profit? Attorneys for the California plaintiff hit that theme hard, drawing parallels to the lawsuits of the 1990s that found companies intentionally engineered an addictive, harmful product, denied the risks publicly and targeted young users.

But the comparison fails in some ways. Tobacco’s chemical grip is physiological; social media’s is behavioral. What recommended solutions lie ahead? FDA-style oversight? The government that offers to protect kids from doomscrolling has already shown a propensity for shutting down free speech inconvenient to the ruling class.

The blame directed at Big Tech is real and deserved, but there are huge risks to the supposed remedies of government regulation and punitive jury verdicts. While a smoker suing a tobacco company for his lung cancer is asking a jury to absolve him of blame, the cancer is provably real. Children and young adults professing damage at the hands of social media may well have been adversely affected by numerous other factors, from bad parenting to life traumas to already existing mental disorders. How is a jury to know what harms have come at the hands of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok?

The Los Angeles panel made that presumption, and others are sure to follow. An even more costly blow was delivered the same week in New Mexico, as a jury hit Meta with a $375 million judgment involving claims that the company misled users about safety and enabled child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Those charges are less nebulous. They hinge on what companies did or did not do, rather than the emotional testimony of a parade of youths swearing that their mental dysfunctions had roots in their phones.

Parents have parents over their kids’ smartphones

And what if they did? There surely are people of all ages zoned out like zombies in the glow of dopamine-triggering posts. But the best pushback should come from the marketplace. Stop throwing smartphones at sixth-graders. No devices at the dinner table. The same public awareness campaigns that drove smoking into the caves of unpopular behavior can properly stigmatize melting our brains on social media.

There is a role for the courts. Parents should sue when platforms violate age-appropriate marketing laws already on the books, and we can consider outright legislative age limits on social media. Freedom is not the absence of limits; it is the enactment of wise limits we impose on ourselves.

The most effective limits are personal. Parents should profoundly curtail screen time for kids. And adults should look hard at their own hours spent gazing at apps instead of talking to people, reading books, and plugging into friends and community. No algorithm can ensnare a society that knows when to put the phone away.

Mark Davis hosts a morning radio show in Dallas-Fort Worth on 660-AM and at 660amtheanswer.com. Follow him on X: @markdavis.