Op-Ed: Meta's Court Loss May Backfire in a Big Way

In an essay at Techdirt, Mike Masnick makes clear he thinks Meta "is a terrible company" that has prioritized profit over user safety. You might expect, then, that he would be cheering this week's landmark court verdict holding Mark Zuckerberg's company liable for "enabling child exploitation," plus another verdict in California that blamed Meta and YouTube for harming a young user with addictive products. On a "visceral, emotional level," Masnick is happy with the results. "But if you care about the internet—if you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things—these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you."

Masnick argues that the verdicts advance a legal theory threatening to gut Section 230, "the legal backbone of the internet" that holds users responsible for what they post, not the platforms hosting them. The new tactic: Don't sue over content, sue over "product design" features like infinite scroll, recommendations, notifications, even encryption. Courts let those claims dodge Section 230 on the grounds they weren't about speech—but Masnick notes those "design choices" are exactly how platforms present user speech. Meta can afford hefty lawsuits, but smaller rivals cannot. Masnick lays out how this new legal tactic might bring about the demise of the open internet, "cheered on by people who think they're punishing a bully but are actually handing the bully's biggest competitors a death sentence." Read the full essay.