Designed for addiction? A legal reckoning for social media

We underestimate the importance of design in our lives. We focus on acts and people, and we tend to take systems and structures for granted. But design elements – how our cities are built, how our educational institutions are governed, how our economic system is managed, and how our families are constituted – greatly impact our lives. Focusing on design features has one major problem – it is difficult to attribute blame or responsibility when things go wrong. It’s always easier to blame individuals and actions rather than design features because many design elements, say the manner in which the market is constituted, occur by happenstance rather than intentionally. But when design happens by design, it opens up the possibility for holding people responsible for any ensuing harm.

This brings me to the social media landscape where, as is clear by now, there is harm, particularly to the very young and the very old and to plenty of people in between. Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok are platforms that thrive on their members engaging with each other. More engagement means more advertisements. Not content with organic engagement, the platforms want to engineer engagement. They want people to stay on the platform as long as possible. To this end, they design their platforms with features like infinite scrolling that encourage people to view a continuous stream of content.

Kaley, a social media user in the United States, started on YouTube when she was six and on Instagram when she was nine. Soon, she was addicted to the social media universe and developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. She sued Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, arguing that the social media platforms were responsible for the state she was in. TikTok and Snap took the path of least resistance and settled. Meta and Google fought it out and lost the case. In the US, such cases are considered tort claims, meaning a civil case where one party alleges another breached a duty of care, causing harm for which compensation is sought. Such cases are decided in the US by jury trials. The jury, in K.G.M. v Meta et al, returned a guilty verdict stating that Meta and Google were negligent in designing their platforms (Instagram and YouTube, respectively) because their systems allowed users to become addicted to the platforms and suffer harm. The jury awarded six million dollars in damages: three million compensatory and three million punitive.

There is a lot to unpack here. To begin with, the US, like India, has a safe harbour provision in its law for social media platforms. Under this provision, they are not liable for harmful content they host as long as they fulfil certain conditions and perform due diligence in regulating the content. The provision effectively transfers the risk of harmful content to the creators rather than the platforms. The K.G.M. case does not so much reallocate the risk as much as create a new risk category based on design. The case appears agnostic about the harmfulness of the content; it focuses exclusively on design. If the design of a system leads to people spending too much time on the system, the system is culpable.

The case is a bellwether for future regulation of the tech industry. There are multiple cases against social media giants seeking damages for their allegedly addictive systems. The K.G.M. case might be the gateway for a more aggressive legal response. But despite the popular rhetoric against Meta and Google, we must parse carefully the legal issues of culpability and harm. Should design elements that actively encourage user engagement make platforms liable for harm? Shouldn’t we also address social media addiction by restricting access? Don’t parents carry any responsibility in limiting their children’s access to social media? What about schools? Meta and Google dominate the markets, and people looking for online social engagement have to rely on these giants. Perhaps, this is enough to make them accountable, but this kind of monopoly responsibility needs to be fleshed out in greater detail.

Similarly, we must be cautious in ascribing harm to supposedly addictive social media platforms. How do we settle on a fact-finding process that brings a certain measure of certainty to the determination of harm from social media addiction? What about the person’s medical history, family circumstances, or work pressures? Social media platforms have a lot to answer for, but those answers must be embedded in sound legal reasoning. Policymaking in this area is in its infancy. The K.G.M. case can become the fulcrum around which we can develop more sophisticated models of legal responsibility for social media platforms.

The writer is a law professor who thinks that the law is too important to be left to the lawyers.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.