Casey Newton

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.

It's you built a product and the product is defective, right?

They were able to successfully liken these things to cars without seatbelts.

And it just really resonated with jurors.

And I think it's worth...

Taking a minute to talk about why that might be, because I think this is something that the people that I talk to at the social media companies never seem to understand.

Everybody knows someone who has a huge problem with Instagram.

This person is probably in your immediate family.

They have deleted it a hundred times off their phone and they always reinstall it.

They've set the screen time limits, but they keep coming back over and over again and they hate themselves for it, right?

This is a near universal experience in America now.

And so when you sit a jury down and you say, there's something wrong with Instagram,

it's pretty easy to find a lot of people who say, that sounds right to me.