Internet law professor breaks down the Meta/YouTube addiction verdict and what comes next

be the puffer jacket with the the stitching on the back is very nice. Uh there's a lot of fun examples of other other swag in the replies. Well, without further ado, let's bring in Eric Goldman who's at university. He's the associate dean for research and a professor there. Eric, how are you doing?

What's going on?

I'm all right, thanks. How are you?

I'm good. Thanks so much for joining. Uh please, since it is the first time on the show, I'd love a little bit of an introduction and then of course I want to go into the case today. Uh, sure. Uh, I'm Eric Goldman. I'm a professor of law and associate dean for research at Santa Clair University School of Law. I've been doing internet law for over 30 years, teaching, researching in the area. And my area of specialization includes how users talk to each other online.

Okay. And when did you start tracking the meta YouTube uh lawsuit? How long has this been going on? And then I want to hear about your expectations for the case, your interpretations of the case, how things played out.

Uh so I started tracking the cases when they were filed. Uh I can set up electronic alerts to notify me of new filings in the cases.

Um and I had to give that up after a while. These parties were just beating each other up in court um with an enormous volume of very pun filings. So um I stopped talking at that level um a while ago. Uh it's hard to track the state court cases. There isn't an electronic tracker for that. So it's been a little bit harder to get the information in that case. Um and uh this has been going on for a couple years and many millions of dollars have been spent by both sides in these cases.

So uh take us through what actually happened, how we should be interpreting the the the the verdict and uh and then we'll go into where we go from here. Uh so we need to step back for a moment and let me lay the uh describe the landscape and then we'll see how this case fits into it. Yeah. Um in California state court in Los Angeles there have been hundreds of uh plaintiffs who filed lawsuits against the social media services. These cases have been joined together in a proceeding but they're not a class action. So there's hundreds of parallel lawsuits all say next to each other. A similar lawsuit is also pending in federal court in Northern California. It's called a multid-district litigation or an MDL and there are thousands of plaintiffs in that case as well. Similar format. They're sitting next to each other. It's not a class action. That case also includes PL entities like school districts um and uh uh Native American tribes. So, there's other entities in that as well. And then there have been individual filings across the country by state attorneys general and others uh in the lawsuits. Um so there's basically just a litigation mania taking place across the United States.

Yeah.

And what does it what does it actually take to qualify a plaintiff? Do they just look at their screen time and say like, "Ah, you used social media for five hours last week. You're addicted." And then they kind of figure out how to

how to kind of, you know,

turn suit.

Uh it there is no screening for who gets named as a plaintiff. They just raise their hand and say, "I think I qualify." Um and they've been joining these lawsuits. Um the lawyers of course are helping them and each trying to each lawyer is trying to add to their portfolio of plaintiffs that they uh have that they're representing. Um, so but whether they're actually going to get any recognition from the court or money, they'll have to make their case eventually. So that's part of why the the trial was held that that led to the verdict that came out this week. What they did in the California State Court case is they said, "We're going to pick three plaintiffs and we're going to do what we're called bellweather trials. We're going to let the parties make their case to the uh jury and we're going to see what the jury thinks." The goal was to do three, not just one, with the idea that plaintiffs have so many different stories, the victims are each in their own unique situation that we wanted to get multiple data representations from the pool of plaintiffs to start to be able to estimate the overall value of the case. So, the first one came out and the jury agreed with the plaintiffs, did not agree with the defendants, and awarded $6 million of damages. Now, this is just the first data point of what's expected to be three just in the state court case. There's lots of activity taking place throughout the country.

So, how how should we think about the actual ruling? Uh the Wall Street Journal has a headline Meta and YouTube found addictive and harmful. Uh what how how are you interpreting the nature of what the plaintiff attorney proved? At the core, the plaintiff's lawyers had to make a number of novel arguments both to the judge to get to the trial and then in front of the jury, they had to convince the jury to recognize the harms that the victim suffered and attribute them back to social media uh services. And the jury agreed with all of that. And so the way to I think to interpret this uh uh verdict is that we've now heard from some ordinary Americans. I don't want to say, you know, metaphorically picked off the street. Um, and asked them how do they feel about the accountability of social media services for the harm that their uh of their users and the uh jury said we think that the social media services should be responsible and we should assign some pretty significant dollar values to that responsibility. Is is that uh is is six million seen as a uh uh a significant dollar value in the courts because these companies are so big? Uh but again, this could just be the beginning of it by potentially thousands.

Yeah. So, so where does this go in terms of uh the the uh the damages as they snowball? Will there be a class action, some sort of master settlement uh that that goes way bigger?

Just about the numbers for a moment. Um $6 million is uh far less than what the plaintiffs requested. Um it's far more than I think the defendants had hoped. Um and as you were pointing out, if you multiply it times 3,000 potential plaintiffs that are already in the queue, um that translates into something on the order of like 20 billion. Again, maybe numbers that Meta and Faith and Google have, but Tik Tok and Snap, if they're also going to be coming along for the ride on this, maybe they don't have that. maybe that becomes uneconomic.

So the numbers grow I think really rapidly because not only is it the people who've already filed, it's all the other potential users who will say just like um uh like you were suggesting earlier who will say, you know, I've been addicted for five hours on my site. There could be tens of thousands of more plaintiffs coming through. The numbers on this could get extraordinary. Now remember, this is only one data point. The other two Bellweather cases could establish no liability or they could assign much larger damages. Yeah. And so we'll see if that 6 million is even the right number for the parties to start estimating the settlement.

Sure. So uh will those other bellweather cases uh for sure resolve before this gets appealed? Do you anticipate that this ruling will get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court? How do you think about the interaction between the Bellweather cases and then other legal proceedings? So my I believe that the appeals are going to be lodged now, but I would expect that by the time that the appellet court is ready to hear the appeals, the other two cases will have been resolved and ideally they'll be all handled together. Whoever doesn't get the results they want in the other two bell weather trials would go ahead and appeal those as well. All these cases are going to be appealed until there's some kind of definitive resolution. Um, and I would expect the appeals to go up uh all the way as high as the court will take them. The US Supreme Court has discretionary review, so they may not take it, but I expect the cases to be appealed to them unless there's a settlement. And you did ask about that, and let me just close the thought. The difficulty with a settlement is because they are not class actions, the defendants cannot settle against all the potential plaintiffs. They can only settle against the ones who've already expressed uh uh who've already signed up to the case. Um, and so one of the tricky aspects of this case is how could they price the settlement to pick up all these other potential plaintiffs who are waiting in the wings.

Are there any other countries that have gone through this process of uh litigating social media addiction? It feels uh like uncharted territory. I when I see things like the effect of the like button or endless scroll or feeds. uh there's been a conversation about the effect of those technologies for a long time, but uh this is the first time I've seen them actually been, you know, in the court of law.

That's a great question and I don't actually know if there's been any trials on these questions in other countries and other countries don't always have a jury system like we do. So, I do think we are in some new ground here. Yeah. Um, having said that, other countries often can regulate the specific mechanics of online publishers in ways that the first amendment may not protect permit here. So the uh other countries might very well have already dictated that certain things cannot be done that are part of the litigation now.

Yeah. So, do you think that there's a hope for sort of new federal regulation alongside what is going on with section 230 that sort of sets the rules of the road at a national level that then if you're in compliance to you can't be held guilty of, you know, this these all these lawsuits.

Uh it's possible that we could get some kind of federal legislation that provides some kind of security or safe harbor for the defendants. Yeah. um that would also preempt any of the state laws that would conflict with that. I don't see that anywhere in the overton window, you know, the window of what's actually being debated today. Yeah. Um but maybe if the services are feeling up pain, they would be willing to um uh to pursue that. The reality is today that states throughout the country are passing laws that um govern the same issues that are at an issue in the litigation. Um, and so unless there's some federal parent laws, the the defendants, the social media service are going to have to navigate this ever growing stack of state legislation.

Mhm.

Jordy, please.

Do you think we get to a point where when you open a social media app, it has like an addiction warning like you might see on a cigarette on a on a cigarette box. Is that is that where this is headed? or if this goes far enough, are we are the platforms running the risk of, you know, needing to remove the like button because it it uh hurts people's mental well-being or or uh eliminating the the infinite scroll uh or or app level usage limits like what are what are kind of like the

extreme sort of downside scenarios for the platform? M

uh so there have been some states that have enacted uh mandatory warning labels like you're describing. Uh those are going to be subject to constitutional challenge. It's not clear to me that they're actually constitutionally permitted. Uh for example, Texas's law has uh I believe been enjoined on that very point. Um so the warning label approach I don't think is likely to be the final resolution in any uh of any of the disputes here. Um, I think that that's going to be an effort that probably isn't going to either solve a problem or be constitutional.

Um, it is already the case that states have passed laws that have done things like tried to ban auto scrolling or um infinite scrolling or autoplay or the like button or like counts or whatever. Um, states are going to get to that level of um granularity and they're already doing so. many of the things that are already part of social media features today are regulated by state laws that are on the books but possibly being in the process of of being challenged. Um, and I think the bigger question isn't will we, you know, lose our like button or will we lose infant scrolling. I think we would consider that for those of us who are afficionados of social media who think that there's some value to them, we would consider that to be maybe the best possible outcome. I think the more serious outcome is what social media services drop out of the industry entirely. What social media services add barriers to user populations having access to social media and how much we see the circumscription of social media conversations entirely. In other words, I don't think we should assume that social media will exist in its current form in the future. The question is whether will we even have social media in the future. that I think are the states of the uh cases and the legislation.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Um what other industries have been through this type of uh pivotal moment and where where should we be drawing analogies or where should we avoid drawing analogies? Uh people have said social media is the new cigarettes. Uh Jordi was making a point about the warning labels on cigarettes. It feels like that might not be the actual best analogy. I was talking to uh Tyler on our team about the risks associated with driving a motorcycle and I was making the point that uh there's an instruction manual manual that you buy that you get that you get with a motorcycle that you know puts a lot of the risk on you if you choose to transport yourself.

This really progresses like unprecedented sets is like okay fast food companies shouldn't be able to use bright colors in their logo.

There's a lot Yeah. There's a lot of different

musicians shouldn't be able to play hooks that are just too catchy

catchy maybe. I don't know. Yeah. But but where do you think the the best analogies are?

Um I'm not a fan of analogies between online and offline um activities. Um and in particular, I don't like the analogy to tobacco. And let me make clear why. And I think that'll start to enlighten where the risks and opportunities are. Um tobacco we would generally say there are no health benefits to consuming tobacco. Nobody is healthier because of that. It's just either neutral or negative.

But social media consumption has many social benefits. There are many communities that that are thriving online and who um uh uh are you know I think justify be concerned that their benefits are at risk in this litigation without them even having a say in it. So unlike tobacco, social media is a mix of potentially very helpful things and things that could potentially be harmful for some of its consumers. And those kinds of mixed uses technology that have both benefits and potential detriments are really I think a better analogy than tobacco. And I don't know that we have great circumstances where we can point to where uh mass tort litigation has targeted and potentially removed uh from the industry uh these mixed use scenarios.

And in the end, the things that people are being uh addicted to or that are allegedly causing harm are people talking to each other. Yeah. And that kind of speech related theme is unlike almost any physical product that we might draw an analogy to. Mhm.

Yeah, that it's a fascinating case. Uh we really appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us about it. Uh I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.

Yeah, come back on as there's more news.

Yeah, we'd love to talk to you again in the future.

Just scratching the surface.

This was really helpful.

Been great talking to you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Uh our next guest is in the TDP