A legislative proposal to fix social media and end addictive tech design by allowing consumers to directly sue tech giants for causing compulsive use.
We need to end Big Tech's incentive to maximize engagement at all costs. The Addictive Tech Accountability Act can do just that.
Today’s biggest social media platforms have a direct financial incentive to build products that hook consumers. The more time a user spends on the platform, the more money these companies can make from ads and data collection.
The warped incentive to maximize time-spent drives virtually all of the major problems presented by social media today. It's bad for consumers—and society.
Many proposals have emerged in recent years to address some of the symptoms of this problem, from school phone bans to age-appropriate design codes. These are important steps in the right direction, but much more is needed. We need to directly address the root of the problem.
For meaningful, lasting change, we must make big tech companies feel the costs their products are imposing on consumers and society.
The Addictive Tech Accountability Act would flip the incentives for tech companies by allowing consumers to hold them directly liable for compulsive use. Instead of designing their products to increase engagement at all costs, the bill would force companies to innovate and take all reasonable steps to make their products less addictive.
An addictive design tort doesn't inflexibly prohibit companies from using any design features. It simply requires that they take all reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use.
This ensures that companies have full freedom to design products that are good for consumers, while simultaneously preventing them from designing their products to be more addictive, and even motivating them to proactively find ways to make their products less addictive.
The bill only requires companies to take all reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use. This well-established framework looks to whether a platform could have been designed to be less likely to cause compulsive use, but expects companies to have opted for this safer design only when doing so would not sacrifice more utility than it would provide.
This ensures that companies will not need to make their products unusable or worse for consumers in order to comply with the duty. If a jury (a panel of, in effect, ordinary consumers) thinks the more addictive design benefits consumers more than it hurts them, the company will not be liable. In this way, the bill will force companies to find ways to make their products less addictive, but without ruining the platforms.
When specific design features are banned, companies are likely to come up with new, similarly harmful features that fall just outside the scope of the existing prohibition. This creates a major future-proofing issue.
A general duty to take reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use avoids this. Instead of providing specific rules companies can skirt around, it imposes a general standard of conduct (a duty of reasonable care) to which companies must conform, and then uses that standard to determine, after an injury has occurred, whether the company should have done more to prevent it. This forces companies to exercise genuine care—and, when in doubt, err on the side of caution—rather than finding ways to comply with the letter of the law while undermining its spirit.
While children and teens are unusually vulnerable, addictive social media design hurts everyone. Yet all the regulatory efforts so far have focused on kids. This is because they restrict rights in a way that would be deemed paternalistic if applied to adults.
But rather than restricting freedom, the Addictive Tech Accountability Act works by giving consumers the right to be compensated when they have suffered a specific harm. This offers a politically viable way to protect all consumers, not just kids. This means companies would not need to engage in any form of age assurance to comply with the law.
Allowing consumers to sue and recover for addictive design puts power in the hands of the people. Ordinary people bring the claims, and ordinary people (jurors) evaluate them to decide if the companies should have done more to prevent the harm.
Relying on private enforcement, rather than government, prevents abuse or selective enforcement (always a concern given the role these platforms play in the dissemination of news and information). It also insulates enforcement from shifting political priorities and regulatory capture.
The tech industry aggressively challenges even the most modest social media regulations in court. But an addictive design tort’s focus on social media companies as product designers rather than content distributors or publishers makes it especially well placed to survive First Amendment and Section 230 challenges. The tort's reliance on well-trodden principles like “reasonableness” also helps ward off a vagueness challenge, while allowing the law to stay broad enough to be effective.
The Addictive Tech Accountability Act is fully compatible with, and complements, other efforts to regulate social media and other technologies. Indeed, while the bill can function well as a standalone, the strongest results will come from combining it with other interventions—such as school phone bans, privacy protections, and digital advertising taxes, and specific prohibitions on features known to be unusually harmful—that many states have already enacted.
No. The bill only applies to platforms with over 50 million active users that are owned by businesses that make over $50 million in annual revenue, and so explicitly exempts all but the largest tech companies that are causing the most harm. Even without this carveout, though, the bill would not affect small businesses, as liability under the law scales with the number of consumers affected. Platforms without a lot of users would have a very low liability risk.
In this way, the bill actually serves to increase competition, helping to give smaller businesses/platforms more of a competitive edge in a landscape typically dominated by a small number of giants.
No. The Addictive Tech Accountability Act is uniquely suited to tackle what is wrong with social media while keeping what's working well intact.
The bill would require social media companies to exercise all reasonable care to prevent compulsive use. The emphasis on reasonability is key here. It is a well-established concept in tort law that is determined by a risk-utility analysis. In essence, even if a company could have designed its platform to be less likely to cause compulsive use, it is only required to actually take that step if doing so would not sacrifice more utility than it provides. In litigation, this risk-utility analysis will be conducted by a jury. While in many instances that might not be desirable, here jurors—as a sample of regular consumers themselves—are perfectly positioned to make this judgment. The jury will be shown evidence that a company could have used a different, less addictive design, and will then decide whether use of that design would have been better or worse for consumers.
Under this framework, platforms would likely be required to remove many addictive features, like infinite scroll, slot-machine style intermittent variable rewards, and engagement-maximizing addictive feeds in many instances. They would also be expected to invest resources into coming up with new designs to enrich the user experience while empowering consumers to better control their time spent online. But the reasonableness analysis ensures platforms would not be required to adopt design changes that would ruin the platform, render it unusable, or otherwise substantially inconvenience users. In other words, it mandates the changes users would want, and doesn't require changes users wouldn't want.
"Compulsive use" is a more precise term for what might colloquially be referred to social media "addiction." The term addiction is contentious. Even among clinicians, definitions vary, and some experts disagree with the existence of non-chemical behavioral addictions at all. "Addiction" also conjures up images more extreme and severe than this bill intends to target. "Compulsive use" gets at the core idea, but without the baggage. Specifically, it is use that is both (1) excessive enough to meaningfully interfere with a user's life, and (2) compulsive, in that the user finds it difficult to stop or reduce despite a desire to do so.
Allowing consumers to recover for this injury would be extremely impactful. Right now, because the law does not recognize such a harm as compensable, plaintiffs need to allege downstream harms, such as physical injuries or severe and diagnosable psychiatric disorders caused by their overuse. Such claims form the basis of much of the ongoing litigation currently underway against companies like TikTok and Meta. But these claims face major hurdles. They are hard to prove causation for. They are deeply personalized, meaning they cannot viably be brought in a class action. And they only capture a small fraction of the total harm caused by addictive design.
Letting consumers sue for compulsive use directly would change all that. It would allow for a far larger group of consumers to hold tech companies accountable for the damage they cause, and creates a common injury, in turn making class actions viable.
While not everyone hurt by addictive tech design will necessarily meet the criteria for "compulsive use," because compulsive use is a predictable, and inevitable, consequence of addictive design, holding platforms accountable for compulsive use would force them to change their design practices for everyone. Indeed, tech giants' own internal data shows that compulsive use is extremely common.
The law continuously develops and evolves in response to new technologies, and legislatures routinely impose special liability on companies to address specific harms. The problems posed by social media justify doing so here. Fundamentally, addictive tech design presents a major public policy problem. Imposing a duty on the largest tech platforms to prevent causing compulsive use is a common-sense and precise way of addressing this problem.
There are also several reasons why compulsive use of social media merits special liability, in a way that compulsive use of other products might not. First, most other addictive products naturally cause physical harm that can serve as the basis of a lawsuit. This means liability for compulsive use itself is less necessary than here, where for many people an action recovering for the harm of compulsive use is the only way to make companies internalize the cost of addictive design. Second, addictive tech design specifically impacts society—not just individual consumers—in a way that merits a special response. In addition to harming the individual, addictive design contributes to political polarization, the spread of misinformation, and the degradation of public discourse. These threaten our democracy itself, justifying a special governmental intervention. Third, unlike most addictive products, technologies like social media have become a largely unavoidable part of modern life. Abstaining carries real social (and often financial) costs. This makes it less viable to go "cold turkey." It is not fair to expect people to routinely use addictive products and then hold them responsible for the ensuing compulsive use.
If social media companies profit from compulsive use, the law should make them bear the cost of the harm that compulsion creates.
Addictive design hurts everyone. Adults and minors alike are harmed by addictive design practices that manipulate us into spending more time online than we would choose and bombard us with low-quality or misleading clickbait. An effective policy response should recognize this and serve the interests of all consumers, not just kids.
More than this, limiting the law's protections just to minors can create bad incentives and encourage malicious compliance. If companies are required to prevent causing compulsive use only for minors, they will likely respond not by removing their addictive features, but by kicking kids off their platforms or—more likely—creating a separate "kids' safe" version while continuing to profit by providing the addictive versions to adults. To stop adults from using this non-addictive version provided to minors, though, companies would be likely to both (1) require users to verify their age, which is unpopular with consumers and, if poorly executed, raises serious privacy concerns; or (2) make their kids' version intentionally worse, both to discourage adults from using it and to reduce political support for expanding this law to other jurisdictions by persuading consumers that it will make platforms less useful.
For all of these reasons, lawmakers should avoid the urge to limit the right of action proposed here to minors.
The Addictive Tech Accountability Act provides a politically viable way to make social media better for everyone. This opportunity should not be squandered.
It's looking promising, especially at the state level. As the COVID-19 pandemic made us increasingly aware of our screen time, we have entered a political moment of widespread and bipartisan support for meaningful regulation of social media. Over the last two years, many states have introduced and passed laws to try to tackle addictive design, and the momentum continues to grow. As they do, many lawmakers—both Democrat and Republican—seem eager for novel proposals that will actually be effective, and in the process, interest in civil liability for social media platforms has grown. In private conversations, lawmakers have expressed a desire to “unleash the trial lawyers.” And legislators in a number of states have already stated their interest in introducing the Addictive Tech Accountability Act in 2027.
No. One of the benefits of this model is it does not require any form of age verification or age assurance. This is because the duty of care and right of action created by the bill extends to all consumers, not just minors. Because platforms would owe everyone this duty of care, there is no need to treat users differently based on their age.
It can be enacted by either. Since tort law is traditionally a matter of state law, states are the natural adopters of this proposal. State legislatures also tend to be faster moving and more willing to adopt novel policy ideas than Congress. As a result, getting the law passed by state legislatures is the initial priority.
That said, the regulation of social media plainly falls under Congress's power under the Commerce Clause, meaning the Addictive Tech Accountability Act certainly can and should be enacted federally, too.
Not under the prevailing interpretation of Section 230, or any reasonable interpretation of the statute for that matter. Section 230 prohibits internet companies from being "treated as the publisher" of third-party content. But the Addictive Tech Accountability Act holds companies liable for their role as product designers, not as user-generated content publishers. Indeed, the law makes clear that only design, and not third-party content, can serve as the basis for a claim.
No. The Addictive Tech Accountability Act regulates design, not content. There are strong arguments that the regulation of design features in this way does not implicate the First Amendment at all, since these features are not inherently expressive and the changes necessary to restrict addictive design should not impede platforms' ability to display or share user-generated content. Even to the extent the bill does implicate the First Amendment, though, it should be subject only to intermediate, not strict, scrutiny, as it is content-neutral.
The Addictive Tech Accountability Act should survive intermediate scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny requires that a law (1) serve an important governmental purpose, and (2) be narrowly tailored to achieving that purpose. Typically social media design regulations struggle with this second prong, not the first. Protecting consumers from manipulative, addictive design features that harm their mental wellbeing, diminish productivity, and hurt society is certainly an important interest, after all. But an addictive design tort is uniquely well-equipped to survive this intermediate scrutiny analysis, since it is quintessentially narrowly tailored. By allowing only for damages, an addictive design tort does not directly restrict the behavior of tech companies; it only imposes an economic cost on them. And by its very nature, a tort imposing liability for compulsive use tailors this economic cost to the actual harm caused—the very harm the government has an interest in preventing. Companies are still free to pursue whatever course of conduct they choose, so long as they do not unreasonably cause compulsive use. It is hard to envision how a regulation could be tailored more narrowly.
This approach is actually especially well-placed to avoid vagueness issues. As a general matter, a statute is unconstitutionally vague if the ordinary person, exercising ordinary common sense, would not be able to understand it sufficiently to comply with it. While vagueness issues typically come up in the criminal context, the tech industry has recently levied vagueness challenges against a number of social media design regulations, with some success.
An addictive design tort, though, while broad, is not vague. The Supreme Court has made clear that vagueness in the text of a statute can be cured where statutory construction by a court resolves the vagueness. That is precisely what has happened here. "Reasonable care" is, on its face, a general—and perhaps even vague—standard. But its meaning and boundaries have been exhaustively resolved by the courts. Indeed, reasonable care is one of the oldest and most well-established concepts in law. Furthermore, reasonableness looks to how the ordinary person exercising ordinary prudence would behave—a standard that the ordinary person is, by definition, able to understand and comply with.
If a court were to strike down the Addictive Tech Accountability Act on vagueness grounds, it is hard to see how any of negligence of design-defect products liability law could survive. Relying on tort law to regulate addictive tech design is consequently a promising approach to survive a vagueness challenge, and to do so without sacrificing regulatory effectiveness and breadth.
Yes they would—likely in all courts, but at the very least in state courts. The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez tightened the injury requirement for standing in federal court. The Court made clear that legislatures "may not simply enact an injury into existence, using its lawmaking power to transform something that is not remotely harmful into something that is." But the Court also clarified that legislatures "may 'elevate' harms that 'exist' in the real world... to actionable legal status." An addictive design tort does the latter. Compulsive use is inherently harmful. It is an interference with autonomy that necessarily, by its definition, interferes with one or more major life activities, like sleeping, eating, socializing, or working. While this harm has not traditionally been cognizable at common law, it does "exist," and as such, even after TransUnion, legislatures should be free to "elevate" it "to actionable legal status."
Importantly, even if courts find compulsive use to be an insufficiently concrete harm for federal court standing, this standard does not apply to state courts. Indeed, state-court standing requirements are far more lenient than the federal requirements, and even when they do emulate the federal standard, they can be overriden by state statute as they are typically non-constitutional. As such, even if compulsive-use-as-injury claims could not be brought in federal court, they could certainly be brought in state courts. Indeed, state courts are often plaintiffs' preferred forum for products liability claims regardless. If a defendant sought to remove such an action to federal court, and the federal court found there was inadequate standing, the court would be required to remand the case back to state court rather than dismissing it. For these reasons, standing should not serve as a barrier to the addictive design claims made possible by the Addictive Tech Accountability Act.
The proposal for an addictive design tort recognizing compulsive use as an injury was developed by Hayden Davis, a public interest lawyer concerned about the harmful effects of social media. He began developing the idea in 2022, feeling that existing regulatory approaches—though worthwhile—would not, by themselves, be enough to adequately change tech companies' behavior. He created the model legislative text and materials available on this website and is now working with lawmakers to get the bill adopted in states in 2027.
A short-form summary of his proposal was published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation Markup in June 2026. His full-length law review article, Addiction as Injury: Making Manipulative Tech Design a Liability, laying out the proposal and its theoretical/legal basis in greater detail, is forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review.