June 24, 2026
Throughout the country and across the political spectrum, there is a growing consensus that stricter and more meaningful regulation of social media is needed. Despite social media companies’ lofty promises to “bring the world closer together” and democratize the flow of information, it has become clear that their products, in their current form, are also causing a great deal of harm to consumers—and contributing to some of the deepest problems we face as a society.
Engagement-maximizing algorithms put us into informational silos, amplify misinformation, and direct vulnerable kids towards harmful content (such as content encouraging eating disorders). Short-form “clickbait” disrupts our ability to concentrate. And carefully timed notifications, alongside design features inspired by casinos, keep us online, hurting our productivity, our mental wellbeing, and, ironically, our relationships. Thirty percent of adults report feeling at least somewhat “addicted” to social media, and teens—nearly half of whom describe being online “almost constantly”—now identify social media as the biggest threat to their mental health.
These problems can seem overwhelming, but they all stem from a common cause: tech companies’ interests are at odds with those of the public. Today’s social media giants have a direct financial stake in manipulating people to spend as much time on their platforms as possible, even when it hurts users’ health. More time online means more advertising revenue and valuable user data. For as long as this is the case, platforms will continue to design their products to promote engagement at all costs, and the public will continue to suffer the results.
To address the harms of social media in a meaningful and lasting way, we need to flip tech companies’ financial incentives by forcing them to internalize the costs that their products are imposing on consumers and society. To accomplish this, I propose a new statutory tort for addictive tech design. Such a tort would recognize “compulsive use” of social media as a legally cognizable harm and impose on tech giants a duty of reasonable care to prevent it.
Compulsive use is use of a platform that is both (1) excessive enough to meaningfully interfere with a user’s life, and (2) compulsive, in that the user finds it difficult to reduce or stop use despite a desire to do so. Holding platforms liable for this would finally make tech companies feel the cost of the harm they are causing. In the process, it would compel them to stop engineering their products to promote overuse and would even motivate them to innovate to make their products less addictive—and thus better and healthier for consumers.
In recent months, we have already had a preview of tort liability’s potential to impose a real financial cost on tech companies. Thousands of cases have already been brought against companies like Meta and TikTok by teens claiming harm from addictive design, and the first verdict in a bellwether trial in California this March saw Meta and YouTube forced to pay a combined $6 million to one plaintiff. Yet, despite these early successes, tort law in its current form is ill-equipped to take on addictive tech design. This is because it fails to recognize the most widespread harms that these companies are causing.
Negligence and products liability law’s view of injury focuses on the physical. Purely mental or emotional injuries are generally recognized only in the most extreme and unusual circumstances. This is why the social media lawsuits so far have focused heavily on claims involving downstream physical effects of addictive design, like self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders. Even the claims that do allege purely mental harms rely on extreme fact patterns and severe, diagnosable disorders. These claims make the best of the current doctrine but will never be enough to significantly change tech companies’ behavior. Not only is it immensely difficult to prove causation in these cases, even when they succeed, they hold companies accountable only for the small—albeit tragic—subset of cases where the harm was so extreme as to lead to a cognizable injury. As a result, companies never have to pay the price for the more nebulous, but far more pervasive, harmful effects of addictive tech design: wasted time, diminished mental wellbeing, reduced attention and focus, social isolation.
An addictive design tort recognizing compulsive use as an injury would change that, giving tort law the teeth to take on addictive tech. Under this approach, the largest social media companies would have a duty to take all reasonable care to prevent compulsive use. If they fail to do so, affected consumers would be entitled to fixed statutory damages.
Letting consumers bring claims for the primary and more commonly shared harm of compulsive use—as opposed to the personalized downstream harms that flow from it—would allow for the formation of large class actions. This would mean that, while the damages per victim might be set at a small amount, the worst offending companies that hook millions of users (as their own internal data suggests) would face significant cumulative penalties too large to be written off as just another cost of doing business.
There are several key benefits to this approach. Compared to direct prohibitions on design features, a duty of care is much harder for companies to circumvent. When specific design features are banned, companies are likely to come up with new, similarly harmful features that fall just outside the scope of the existing prohibition. As the government then scrambles to prohibit these new features too, this leads to a game of regulatory cat-and-mouse that the government is unlikely to win. By contrast, tort law can act as a form of ex post regulation, which can be broader and thus harder to skirt around. Instead of specific prohibitions, it imposes a more general standard of conduct to which companies must conform—here, a duty of reasonable care—and then uses that standard to determine, after an injury has occurred, whether the company should have done more to prevent it. Companies are thus forced to exercise genuine care—and, when in doubt, err on the side of caution—rather than merely find ways to comply with the letter of the law while undermining its spirit.
In addition to being difficult to circumvent, this emphasis on reasonability simultaneously avoids undesirable over-regulation. Design-defect products liability law—which claims under this proposal would sound in—generally hinges liability on the availability of a “reasonable alternative design.” This well-established framework looks to whether a product could have been designed to have a lower risk of causing harm, but expects companies to have opted for this safer design only when doing so would not sacrifice more utility than it would provide. This cost-benefit analysis ensures that an addictive design tort would not accidentally destroy social media or render important features effectively banned.
There are other advantages to an addictive design tort, too. Empowering private consumers to bring claims, rather than relying on government enforcement, prevents abuse or selective enforcement by government—a dangerous prospect given the role that these platforms play in the dissemination of news and information. It also insulates enforcement from shifting political priorities and regulatory capture.
On top of all this, a private right of action provides a politically palatable way to improve social media for all consumers, not just kids. Almost all legislative efforts to rein in social media harms so far have been limited to minors. This is because they restrict users’ ability to access certain features in a way that would be denounced as paternalistic if applied to adults. An addictive design tort, however, does not limit consumers’ freedom; it simply gives them a new right to be compensated when they have been harmed in a specific way. Providing such a right would make social media better for everyone, and all without requiring platforms to verify users’ age.
Finally, an addictive design tort’s focus on social media companies as product designers rather than content distributors or publishers makes it well placed to survive the First Amendment and Section 230 challenges that the tech industry has aggressively litigated against other regulatory efforts. The reliance on well-trodden principles like “reasonableness” also helps ward off a vagueness challenge, but without sacrificing breadth.
Social media—and related internet-enabled technologies—have changed our world over the last twenty years. In the process, they have created or are contributing to a host of new problems that our existing regulatory mechanisms are not equipped to handle. A statutory tort for addictive tech design would allow us to keep the benefits of social media while mitigating the harms. If social media companies profit from compulsive use, the law should make them bear the cost of the harm that compulsion creates.
Hayden Davis is a public interest lawyer and the author of Addiction as Injury: Making Manipulative Tech Design a Liability, forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review, which lays out the addictive design tort proposed in this piece in greater detail. He serves as the Redstone Public Service Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
Draft legislative text implementing the addictive design tort proposed in this piece is available at www.endaddictivetech.org/bill-text.