Episode
Social Media Had Gun-Level Immunity. That Just Ended
- Podcast
- Talk Cocktail
- Published
- Apr 16, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2370
- Processing state
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Summary
A jury recently shattered Big Tech’s legal shield. Meta and YouTube: guilty of engineering addiction. This is social media’s tobacco moment . Two industries in America have enjoyed near-total legal immunity for their products: gun manufacturers and social media platforms. Now, juries found Meta and YouTube guilty of harming users by deliberately engineering addiction, knowing the harm, and doing it anyway. Legal experts are calling it social media’s tobacco moment. On a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast I spoke with Fordham University law professor Olivier Sylvain, a former senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission and author of Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control — and How We Can Take It Back. He explains why these suits, in New Mexico and California, succeeded where previous attempts had failed to hold social media platforms accountable. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe