'Legal Siege' Looms Against Social Media Companies

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00:00And in one of the key lines in your story about this, Olivia, you talk about how one lawyer who's

00:05going to be representing the federal cases says, all told, this is a massive legal siege

00:09on the social media industry. Why is it all coming in this wave?

00:14I mean, we have been seeing these lawsuits filed in state and federal court over a number of years

00:20now. This all started back in 2022 after Francis Hagen kind of blew the whistle on Facebook,

00:27releasing a trove of documents about how the social media giant was kind of impacting youth

00:33mental health. Following that, we saw plaintiff's attorneys really focus in on that and start to

00:39file lawsuits against these companies, accusing them of harming children. And over the course of

00:45three years, all of those lawsuits, or the majority of them now, have been consolidated into two

00:51different litigation tracks. In state court and in federal court, we're going to see these cases

00:57come to the courtrooms next year. And it's going to be, you know, as he mentioned in the story,

01:02a massive legal siege on the social media industry. We're expecting to see, you know, a number of

01:07trials next year and possibly thousands of plaintiffs waiting in the wings once those trials close.

01:15Olivia, a part of the reason that this litigation has been pending for quite a long time is that the

01:20social media companies have had this liability shield, right, that has protected them in some

01:26sense from user harm litigation. Explain that shield and why it's now not preventing these pieces of

01:33litigation moving forward. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Communications Decency Act, this is a federal

01:39law that has long protected social media platforms and really any internet platform from facing user

01:45harm lawsuits. What that law does is it provides an immunity shield or a blanket that says you cannot

01:53file a lawsuit against these companies for the content that exists on their sites. What these cases

02:00are trying to do is sidestep that immunity blanket by saying this is not about the content that users are

02:06posting to Facebook, to Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. This is about the design of the platforms,

02:12that these companies intentionally designed their platforms to try and addict young users and

02:19resulting in many harms to kids from, you know, mental health harms like depression, anxiety, all the way

02:27through to self-harm and suicidal issues. Olivia, often the markets ignore potential legal threats for big

02:36tech companies. And it has been notable that actually a lot of companies have been trying to update the

02:41protections for children in particular, I think of Instagram just last week. How have they set

02:46themselves up to really tackle this in a forward going way? Yeah, as these cases have been piling up

02:52in the courtrooms, we've seen almost every one of the defendants start to update their policies to

02:59really try and get better, stronger safeguards for kids. And you saw that recently with what

03:05Meta announced on Instagram. And that's certainly true. But at the same time, this litigation is not

03:12going away. These allegations stand in court. And I think what's remarkable about the kind of position

03:18that we're in right now, is that as of next year, we're going to see the alleged victims of social

03:24media into the courtroom for the first time in the US. So these cases are going to be tried.

03:30Juries are going to hear testimony from teenagers, from experts, from company insiders as well about

03:37whether or not social media has actually harmed the mental health of youth. A lot of people have

03:43been asking that question, but a jury will have to face that question for the first time next year.