Clay Calvert

They breached a duty of care the platforms did in designing them.

And that breach of the duty of the care caused the minors to suffer harm.

She's also allowing a cause of action called negligent failure to warn that social media platforms had a duty to warn minors of the potential harms.

So it's very important that she is focusing, as you said, on the defects, essentially, of the services or products in question rather than on the content.

And she's let the jury decide that question.

So I think they stand firm in the idea that the plaintiff's attorneys in these cases really see a potential money train rolling through town in the hope of large, massive settlements coming from opioid types of cases, as you suggested, jewel vaping types of cases and cigarette tobacco litigation.

So I think that's that's one thing we see.

Those, of course, are products that are ingested that cause alleged addiction.

This is a little bit different.

Nobody ingests social media.

So really what we're dealing here differently is what we might think of as behavioral addiction.

Essentially, that's the allegation that's being made.

But where I think the analogy really breaks down is that social media platforms are speech services or speech products.

They convey speech and speech is protected in the United States by the First Amendment, as long as it doesn't fall into an unprotected category like child pornography or obscenity.

And we're not talking about in this case.

Meanwhile, tobacco, cigarettes, vaping, opioids, those don't have any First Amendment based speech protection.

So the analogy holds true for part, but not on the big picture, because really what's at issue here is speech.

And that's protected by the First Amendment.

Cigarettes aren't First Amendment products protected by that.

So I think that's where that analogy kind of breaks down a bit.