America is an incredibly litigious society, spending more than $300 billion per year, or nearly $1,000 per person, on tort litigation. Every day, trial lawyers searching for hefty payouts are finding new products to target and new clients to take on. They may have just found the ultimate jackpot: the digital domain.
A Los Angeles jury recently held Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube liable to the tune of $6 million for allegedly harmful design features, like infinite scrolling and “like” buttons, which made a 20-year-old woman “feel very depressed” and insecure about her looks.
And rest assured: There are thousands of copycat cases in the works against large tech companies. These cases not only pose serious free speech concerns but also send a signal to trial lawyers targeting other sectors — such as the healthcare industry — that the floodgates are open for dubious claims. This will not only clog the courts and cost taxpayers but lead to increased prices on everything from digital subscriptions to vaccines. It’s time to put a stop to this legal free-for-all and protect taxpayers and consumers.
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The recent jury finding that tech platforms were negligent in preventing harm to children has far-reaching implications. R Street Institute fellow Josh Withrow notes, “This case in California sets a precedent that will compel social media companies to restrict access to and features on their platforms in a way that would be unconstitutional if mandated directly by legislation.” Likely downstream effects include stricter age verification and outright bans on youth access to online platforms.
As the Taxpayers Protection Alliance has repeatedly pointed out, required age verification — whether as a byproduct of legislation or implemented in the shadow of court rulings — necessarily violates the First Amendment rights of all Americans (including adults) and makes anonymous speech effectively impossible. Not to mention, these mandates expose Americans’ sensitive information and documents to cybercriminals, undermining digital safety and increasing harm.
Despite these costs and unintended consequences, the avalanche of lawsuits will likely proceed at a dizzying pace. The digital domain will not be the only casualty of these courtroom antics. Vaccines and their many patients are the next targets of multimillion- and billion-dollar verdicts.
As currently constituted, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) provides payouts for patients injured by vaccines while providing manufacturers a reprieve from costly lawsuits that could disrupt vaccine supply. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to upend that status quo, proposing to swamp the VICP by adding costly and unfounded autism-related claims to the system.
The question over whether to consider autism as a “table injury,” a health condition found to be caused by vaccines and eligible for a VICP payout, is not a new one. In the early 2000s, VICP addressed more than 5,000 autism-related petitions by consolidating them into a handful of test cases for consideration. Years of study, testimony, and submitted evidence yielded a clear result: Vaccines do not cause autism.
As United States Court of Federal Claims Special Master Daniel T. Horner noted in more recent proceedings, petitioners in the test cases, as well as follow-on individual cases, argued separate theories of causation but invariably came up short in the evidence department. That’s not much of a surprise given that the link between autism and vaccines has been extensively studied and debunked by scientists.
Reversing this carefully-thought-out precedent would be exceptionally costly for taxpayers and consumers. As University of Pennsylvania legal scholar Peter Grossi notes, “the economic burden on the VICP of just one year of the most serious autism cases would likely total more than $30 billion — more than 100 times the program’s annual revenues.
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And because such claims could be submitted by those diagnosed within the last three years, the program could be faced with an immediate docket consisting of claims totaling nearly $100 billion. This would almost certainly bankrupt the system, leading to the pre-VICP status quo of disruptive litigation that bankrupted vaccine manufacturers and disrupted supply.
Policymakers must reject any attempt to swamp VICP with dubious and discredited claims. And judges and juries must stand firm against incredibly flimsy product liability cases marshaled against digital platforms. Millions of Americans’ lives, livelihoods, and security depend on stemming the tide of runaway litigation.
Ross Marchand is the executive director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
