Eric Goldman

The big takeaway is that the plaintiff's lawyers successfully convinced the jury to buy into the plaintiff's basic story.

That might sound obvious, but it really wasn't.

We weren't sure if the jury was going to agree with the arguments of the victim, and they did.

And so now that opens up the door for what will other juries agree to and how does that extrapolate into changes to social media?

The point of the trial is called a bellwether trial.

It's designed to basically do some statistical sampling of the overall corpus of cases that have already been filed and get a sense about how the juries are responding to a representative sample.

So it's just one data point, but it gives us a sense that that jury was buying the story.

If we get two more data sets, that becomes a lot more persuasive to both sides about the odds of success or failure.

There is.

Again, the jury bought the plaintiff's basic story.

Now, in that case, the plaintiff was the state attorney general and not an individual victim.

And there were some statutory limitations and considerations in the case that were different than the one in the California state court case.

But in the end, both juries accepted the basic premise that social media services should be legally responsible for the harms they cause their victims.

And that then gives us two different data points suggesting juries are buying that.

Section 230 says, to summarize, websites aren't liable for third-party content.

And the plaintiffs got around that argument for many of their claims by arguing that they weren't suing over the content that the individual victim saw.

They were suing over the way it was presented, the design choices about how the services delivered the content.

I have some reservations about that distinction.

To me, they are all part of the same editorial process.

But the lower court accepted the Section 230 workaround in the case for many of the claims.