TikTok Settles, Leaving Meta & YouTube Alone in First U.S. Jury Trial Over Algorithm-Driven Youth Addiction

Product-liability showdowns that once reshaped industries—from the 1998 $206 billion Big Tobacco Master Settlement to the 2019 Purdue Pharma opioid deal—began with single cases that pried open internal memos. This lawsuit reprises that playbook, but targets code rather than cigarettes or pills, reflecting a long arc: each new mass-consumption technology eventually collides with public-health norms and the courts expand duty-of-care doctrines accordingly (the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act did the same for packaged food). Whether jurors agree that infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms constitute a ‘defective product’ will signal how far U.S. law is willing to pierce Section 230’s immunity and treat software design like any other engineered environment. A ruling against Meta/YouTube could accelerate a century-scale shift from caveat-emptor digital markets to regulated “algorithmic safety,” reshaping how attention itself is commodified—much as workplace rules transformed industrial labor in the early 20th century. If the companies prevail, the status quo of platform self-policing may endure, but the mere staging of this trial indicates that the laissez-faire phase of social media is nearing its historical sunset.