Casey Newton

I do continue to identify as the Silicon Valley editor of The Verge, so I'm glad you feel the same way.

As you know, Nilay, for basically the past 20 years, companies have been able to use Section 230 as a shield, and whenever there is any remotely content-related challenge to any of these platforms in court, they just get dismissed out of hand.

The reason that these cases are bellwethers is that if they were successful, it would open up this new front for litigation, and these companies could no longer just automatically use Section 230 as a shield.

And that now indeed has happened, and we're expecting there will now be dozens more lawsuits proceeding along exactly these same lines.

So I think the Snapchat case was a really important precedent.

It's this case Lemon versus Snap.

Snapchat used to offer this filter where you could turn it on and take a video of yourself in your car, and it would show how fast you were going.

And plaintiffs successfully argued that this had created an incentive within the app for people to go really, really fast and do dangerous things.

And indeed, in this particular case, there was a dangerous crash.

So the reason that that was important

was all of a sudden the 230 shield isn't absolute, right?

There have already been a couple of minor exceptions for like, you know, you can't post about, the platforms have to remove like terrorism and CSAM.

But now we're saying, okay, you can't actually offer a filter like this because it might incentivize a terrible behavior.

This is what sort of opens up the rest of the landscape for the plaintiff's attorneys.

They're able to say like, well, what other design features are there of these platforms and what incentives are they creating?

We're not going to talk about, you know, the actual messages that are being traded back and forth on Snapchat or, you know, the actual content of the post on the Instagram feed.

But we are going to ask about things like infinite scroll and autoplay video and push notifications that arrive continuously throughout the night and might disrupt your sleep.

And all of a sudden they were able to find purchase because they had that initial precedent.

I think that the plaintiffs were able to successfully argue infinite scroll is not the speech of others, right?

There's no sort of liability of another person that gets involved here.