The Terrible Cost of the Infinite Scroll

“In a first ruling of its kind, a California Superior Court jury found Wednesday that Meta and YouTube harmed a user through their addictive design choices. The consequences for the industry could be significant,” Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist, writes for Times Opinion. But if it leads to compensation to the people who suffered harm from their products, that would only be the silver lining, she says. “The real win would be if the social media giants were finally forced to design less harmful products.” Julia continues: >For years, Big Tech has defended itself from allegations of harm by repeatedly using the get-out-of-jail-free card it was granted in a 1996 law— Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It freed tech companies from liability for the content users posted on their sites, and all manner of tech companies used it for decades to successfully defend themselves from a growing list of allegations that they enable deadly drug sales, sexual harassment and illegal arms sales. >A new generation of lawsuits is starting to pierce that veil. Rather than allege that the content was harmful, the plaintiffs argue that the company’s design features and algorithms are perpetrating harm. “The tech industry has historically insulated itself from scrutiny by asserting Section 230, the First Amendment or both. But that time is over,” said Meetali Jain, the founder of Tech Justice Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy and litigation group. Read the full piece [here, for free](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/opinion/big-tech-meta-youtube-lawsuit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.IiPM.2XP5UzcOx2hj&smid=re-nytopinion), even without a Times subscription.

I'll read this just as soon as I finish checking if there's anything else I want to read a little further down on Listnook.

Everyone who's ever been watching YouTube Shorts until 3 in the morning knows that the social media companies deliberately made the things extremely addictive. Netflix's CEO outright said their greatest enemy is sleep. It should *not* have taken this long to sue these companies for this, and similarly, it would be easy to stop the terrible stuff chatbots are doing by making the AI companies liable for everything their product does.

"Scrollin' scrollin'; There used to be an end to the page..."

I want infinite scroll!