Lessons from US courts on social media liability

Even as Gen Z appears to have intuitively decided posting online is passé and India ponders social media bans, courts in the US have taken a strong stand, holding social media platforms liable for online harms, addiction, and its health ramifications.

- NS Nappinai

The Los Angeles county superior court's recent verdict in KGM v. Meta et al (KGM) could prove a watershed moment for a clear-eyed reexamination of intermediary liability. The raison d’étre of safe-harbour exemptions is often lost as social media platforms transition into business behemoths.KGM has sparked a long-delayed deep dive into the functioning and controlling interests driving social media. KGM is not the lone judicial decision pointing fingers at social media platforms for driving content towards users and/or adopting technologies or processes that have causal connects to online harms afflicting users. In State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc, the New Mexico department of justice succeeded in getting a $375-million penalty imposed on Meta for endangering children by exposing them to sexually explicit material and to paedophiles.

That the intermediary exemptions were predicated on third parties sharing information on their platforms is now reasonably well understood. The genesis of this principle — from the US Section 230 Communications Decency Act, 1996, to our own safe harbour exemption under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended periodically) or the IT Act — has been acknowledged by the judiciary.