Prof. Alan Rozenshtein Quoted in New York Times About Lawsuits Against Social Media Platforms Showing Life-Threatening Activities

Professor Alan Rozenshtein was quoted by the New York Times about lawsuits against online platforms such as TikTok that have shown videos of “subway surfing” that have resulted in deaths of youths. Last year, the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was killed subway surfing, filed a lawsuit in New York against the owners of TikTok and Instagram arguing that their products had “targeted, goaded and encouraged” her son to engage in the life-threatening activity of climbing on top of subway trains. Legal experts say that these kinds of cases typically do not succeed because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a federal law that has since the early days of the internet protected online platforms from being held liable for things that their users post, but this could be changing. Prof. Rozenshtein said that in the past five years, courts have demonstrated a willingness to read that protection more narrowly, and that these types of cases are unpredictable. He said that with enough teenage casualties, “it just becomes very hard — rightly so, I think — for judges to say, ‘Well that’s just the cost of having a vibrant internet.’” He said that if there is a ruling against a social media platform, “the implications for the trillion-dollar social media industry are enormous.”