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Courts are finally punishing Big Tech for harming kids. Here’s the catch.

The legal breakthrough that could reshape social media — for better or worse.

This week, juries in California and New Mexico dealt a pair of landmark verdicts against America’s social media giants.

In Los Angeles, jurors awarded $6 million to a young woman who alleged that Instagram and YouTube had damaged her mental health. A day earlier, a jury in Santa Fe ruled that Meta had designed its social media platforms in a manner that harmed minors — and ordered the company to pay $375 million in recompense.

These decisions constituted a breakthrough for a legal movement that sees social media companies as the new “Big Tobacco” — an industry that knowingly peddles harmful and addictive products. And it was a triumph for advocates of “child online safety,” who believe that social media is corrosive to minors’ psychological well-being. With thousands of similar lawsuits pending, the California and New Mexico verdicts could prove to be transformative precedents.

Yet the decisions have also raised alarm bells for many free speech advocates. To organizations like FIRE — and civil libertarian writers like Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown — these decisions will do more to undermine free expression online than to safeguard young people’s mental well-being.

To better understand — and interrogate — this perspective, I spoke with Nolan Brown. We discussed how the recent verdicts could open the door to broader censorship, the evidence for social media’s psychological harms, and whether parents can sufficiently protect their kids from problematic internet use without the government’s help. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

You’ve written that these verdicts are “a very bad omen for the open internet and free speech.” How so?

One key protection for online speech is Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which prevents online platforms from being held liable for speech they host but don’t create.

What we’re seeing in these cases is an attempt to get around Section 230 by recharacterizing speech issues as “product liability” issues. Instead of saying, “We’re going after platforms for hosting harmful speech,” the plaintiffs are saying, “We’re going after them for negligent product design.”

In other words, the choices that social media companies make about how to curate their feeds or encourage engagement.

Right. Some of the things they complained about were “endless scroll” (where you keep going down and the feed doesn’t stop at the end of a page), recommendation algorithms that promote content that a user is more likely to engage with, and beauty filters.

But ultimately, if you look at what they’re actually going after, it comes down to speech. When you talk about TikTok or YouTube being so engaging that it’s “addictive,” you’re talking about content: No matter how TikTok’s algorithm is designed, it wouldn’t be compelling to........

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