Welcome to the Libertarian. I am Charles C.W. Cook, and I'm here with Richard Epstein, the libertarian himself.

Richard, welcome to your own show. It's always an honor to be invited back to my own show.

Of course. This is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

All right, today we're going to talk about social media platforms and the law, in particular,

liability, as the Wall Street Journal reported three days ago.

There are a flurry of lawsuits, that's the Wall Street Journal's term, that, quote, seek to hold social media platforms liable for sundry adolescent problems.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that more than 3,000 personal injury lawsuits against social media platforms have been filed in California state court alone.

So, Richard, before we take into account the various statutes at the state or federal level that regulate the social media space,

absent any intervention from lawmakers, just under our constitutional or common law traditions, how should we

think about the liability that attaches to social media companies as facilitators for alleged harms?

Okay, we use the right word facilitators in there,

but the way you begin is not with the facilitator,

but the doer of the particular harm.

The rule on that is virtually unanimous.

If I defame you, I'm responsible for the defamation.

If I hit you over the head, I'm responsible for the blow.

The difficulty with that provision isn't one about conceptual stuff.

Indeed, if every party who had committed a direct harm were fully solvent, the problem

of derivative liability at the secondary or tertiary level would simply disappear.

But what always happens in these cases is the fellow who's most responsible

legally is least responsible financially. And so what happens is the next question is,

in every case, do we find somebody who's further back on the chain less responsible,

...