For decades, social media companies have operated under the protection of a powerful legal shield.
If something harmful shows up on their platforms,
like harassment or dangerous content, the companies themselves are n't liable.
That shield made social media giants virtually untouchable in court.
Until last week.
In a Los Angeles courtroom, a 20-year-old woman took on Meta and YouTube.
She claimed that the platforms harmed her mental health.
And she won.
Not by breaking through the shield, but by going around it.
This case took a totally different route.
Our colleague Erin Mulvaney covers legal affairs.
And this case, she says, didn't focus on the content on these platforms.
It focused on how the platforms were made.
The way they designed the products.
So that would be the algorithms used to attract people, things we know about like the infinite scroll or notifications
that can lead to dopamine hits for kids and things like that.
And the plaintiff's argument was simple.
If a product's design can cause harm, the platform maker should be held responsible.
I think it was a creative theory.
It hadn't really been tested before.