In Graphic Detail: The Long Road to Accountability for Social Media Platforms

Advertisers can no longer turn blind eye to social media harms, prof says

When American sociologist and economist Herbert A. Simon first introduced the idea of the attention economy in 1971 , the model was based on the “information-rich” mediums of the day — television, radio and print. Boiled down, the theory posits that in a world with more and more information for humans to digest, the scarcity of their attention becomes a valuable commodity. Over 50 years later, while older media survive and claw for scraps of ad…

In graphic detail: The long road to accountability for social media platforms

Last week's social media addiction rulings signal a fundamental shift in how the platforms can now judged on how they are built and designed.

Social media companies have spent a decade arguing they're not publishers — courts are now asking whether they're something more dangerous: product designers whose choices cause measurable harm

Add DMNews to your Google News feed. Tension: Tech companies built their legal identity around being neutral conduits for speech — courts are now forcing them to reckon with the architecture they built beneath that speech. Noise: Section 230 has been treated as settled law, an immovable ceiling above which tech accountability could not reach — a consensus that obscured a growing crack in the foundation. Direct Message: The same argument that sh…

What the social media harms verdict means for health coverage

Last week, a Los Angeles jury did something that public health advocates — and many health journalists — have been watching for years: It held social media companies legally responsible for harm to a young user’s mental health. Jurors found that platforms owned by Meta Platforms and Google (via YouTube) were negligent in designing products that contributed to depression, anxiety and other harms, and failed to adequately warn users. The jury awar…

2 Rough Social Media Rulings Could Actually Improve the Platforms

Last week, within just two days, juries in New Mexico and California delivered verdicts that could change how we think about social media platforms, their youngest users, and the advertisers who support them. A Santa Fe jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company willfully violated New Mexico’s consumer protection laws by