We have spent our careers moving between the exam room, where we treat patients and their symptoms, and the classroom, where we teach medical, law, and business students how these worlds intersect. Lately those worlds are colliding in a way that should worry businesses, physicians, and parents alike.
A California jury recently found Meta and Google liable for a young woman’s depression, anxiety, and compulsive social media use, and commentators have already started calling it social media’s tobacco moment. We understand the impulse. We need a villain to blame for the real toll compulsive screen use takes on adolescents and families. But a multifactorial clinical diagnosis that raises societal concern and a legal cause of action against a potential contributor will not cure the condition, make our patients safer, or relieve parents of their primary responsibility to parent and supervise their children.
Psychiatrist Sally Satel and legal scholar Stephen Morse made this point in a recent essay, warning that social media addiction litigation risks stretching a clinical concept past what the medical evidence, or the law, can support. We would go further. If compulsive use of a lawful product establishes a manufacturer’s legal duty to supervise use after distribution, there is no principled place to stop. This would have a chilling effect on innovation and consumerism. Streaming services, video games, reading, listening to music, gambling apps, caffeine, pornography, AI automated intimacy, and ultra-processed food are all engineered to keep us coming back, yet society has never concluded that every maker of an engaging product, known addicting products such as tobacco and narcotics, or potentially harmful products due to overconsumption such as donuts and cakes owes a duty to prevent its misuse post-sale. Medicine, law, and ethics recognize autonomy and free will with limitations.
History counsels the same caution. Comic books were once blamed for juvenile delinquency, then rock music, then television, then video games, then gangster rap music. Some worries proved partly justified. However, none justified rewriting products liability law around a moving behavioral target or social norms. The courts have been asked multiple times to restrict First Amendment rights but have resisted doing so each time.
This matters most for parents. American law has long placed primary responsibility for a child’s media consumption with the parent, not the publisher. In Ginsberg v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state’s authority to restrict minors’ access to material not considered obscene for adults, reasoning that the state’s interest in children’s welfare reinforces, rather than replaces, parental authority. Here, the Court did not impose liability against the publisher but the seller to minors. One Justice dissented, warning the ruling risked a precedent broad enough to let government shield any group from whatever it later deemed harmful, a caution worth remembering as today’s plaintiffs ask courts to police a new category of content. Decades later, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association struck down a law restricting minors’ access to violent video games, rejecting the idea that a legislature, or a jury, could declare an entire category unprotected against the First Amendment simply because it found the content habit-forming. A teenager’s screen time problem is real. That does not make it a tort problem. Perhaps, instead, parents who fail to restrict or even supervise a child’s social media use bear some responsibility for the anxiety and depression that follows.
Consider, too, how liability works for products we prescribe. When the law holds a manufacturer liable for a lawful, dependence-producing product, it typically does so through the duty to warn, not an absolute duty to prevent individual compulsive use post-distribution. In Wyeth v. Levine, the Court held that a manufacturer’s ongoing responsibility runs to keeping its warning label up to date when new adverse outcome knowledge becomes available, not to prevent every harm a properly labeled product might later cause. Cipollone v. Liggett Group applied similar logic to cigarette makers. It held that manufacturers of a lawful, known dependence-producing, and heavily used product such as cigarettes were not liable for the fact that people became addicted or that the product was designed to be habit-forming, and it did not establish a freestanding duty to prevent compulsive or any use. These cases point toward autonomy of uses and disclosure of known risks, not surveillance of how people behave once a product leaves the shelf. Imagine if every manufacturer were held liable for every unimaginable way a post-sale product could cause harm to self or others. Consider automobiles. It is well known that adolescent drivers and the objects they collide with die in car accidents due to their own or other actions. The harm is not due to the manufacturer’s product or a design deficit, but a misuse issue. Imagine if car manufacturers were sued and found liable for every child’s or other person’s poor judgment such as intoxication while driving, lack of driving skill, lack of impulse control, or using an automobile to intentionally run over pedestrians. These are human actions, and the harms are not caused by the product but by the people with the use of the product.
None of this absolves social media platforms. Companies that deliberately engineer features to exploit a child’s undeveloped impulse control deserve scrutiny and serious legislative attention about stronger age verification, parental controls, and design regulation. But that conversation belongs in the legislature weighing evidence in public, not in a courtroom asking a jury to convert a multifactorial clinical cause of a diagnosis into a damages award against a product the vast majority of users engage with safely. Isolating blame to one potential risk factor for a multifactorial diagnosis and awarding damages only opens the floodgates to mass litigation and attempts to remove the responsibility of autonomy and self-regulation for adults and parenting for children.
For physicians, the task is still what it has always been: Screen for compulsive risk factors and use, counsel families, and treat the anxiety and depression in front of us, regardless of how the litigation resolves. For parents, supervision and conversation at home remain the most reliable intervention we have. Courts can determine liability. They cannot diagnose our patients or raise our children, and we should resist asking them to try.
Gordon B. Kuttner is a reproductive endocrinologist. Vijay Rajput is an internal medicine physician.
