Is Social Media the Asbestos of the Internet? with Matthew Bergman
Opening Arguments
Opening Arguments Media LLC
4.3 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
OA1258 - The Social Media Victims Law Center just made history in a Los Angeles courtroom by holding Meta and Google accountable for mental health harms which they successfully argued to a jury knowingly caused harm to children. In a novel legal theory, these plaintiffs argued that they were harmed not through a lack of content moderation or other editorial choices which might otherwise be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but by the fundamental design of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube. SMVLC founder Matthew Bergman joins to share how his decades of litigating on behalf of people harmed by asbestos brought him to this groundbreaking lawsuit and what it might mean for the thousands of other actions the SMVLC has brought around the US, as well as the upcoming claims which will be litigated by state AGs later this year. Where do the immunities guaranteed by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act end and the harmful and potentially addicting features which social media platforms have knowingly baked into the design of their platforms begin? Is “social media addiction” a demonstrable mental health issue or just a way to pathologize a bad habit? And could these well-meaning suits pose any threats to our privacy and civil liberties in the name of protecting children? We take on these and many more of the questions raised by some of the most fascinating and controversial civil litigation of the 21st century so far.
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Attorney Matthew Bergman’s bio from Lewis & Clark Law’s website
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Social Media Victims Law Center website
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Addiction By Design, Natasha Dow Shull, Princeton University Press (2014)
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Lemmon v. Snap, Inc., 995 F.3d 1085 (9th Cir. 2021)
Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The social media companies make their money by selling advertising, and the more time they can keep kids online, the more advertising they sell. |
| 0:14.0 | We took a different approach, focused not on the content, but on the design features, making |
| 0:22.5 | the products addictive to young people, not by showing them what they want to see, but what |
| 0:26.4 | they can't look away from. |
| 0:45.4 | Hello and welcome to opening arguments. This is episode 1258. I'm Thomas Smith. And in a moment, |
| 0:50.6 | going to be joined by not one, Matt, but two. Well, I suppose a Matt and a Matthew. We're going to be speaking with the social media victims law center founder, |
| 0:55.2 | Matthew Bergman. You may have heard about, and we touched on the recent court victory that the |
| 1:00.4 | SMVLC just had in LA against Meta and Google, taking the approach that this is more of a |
| 1:07.6 | product liability question than, you know, the whole 230 thing. Matt's going to do, Matt Cameron, that is, going to do more introduction and lay the groundwork better than I probably could in this intro. So I'll probably just get right on over to the interview. So that said, we'll take our usual first break here, which you can avoid at at patreon.com slash law, avoid the ads, get the goodies. |
| 1:28.4 | A lot awful movies coming out. |
| 1:29.9 | Could be in a day here. |
| 1:31.3 | We're working on the edit. |
| 1:32.2 | It's almost done. |
| 1:32.9 | Thank you so much to our patrons for making the show happen. |
| 1:35.2 | We'll take a quick break. |
| 1:36.0 | And then we'll be on with Matthew Bergman about the recent win over social media companies. |
| 1:43.5 | Today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me. |
| 1:46.7 | Are you waking up every day knowing you're capable of more, but you're just not sure how |
| 1:51.3 | to get there? |
| 1:52.1 | That's definitely how I feel. |
| 1:53.5 | I also have a tendency to just, like, go it alone on everything. |
| 1:56.5 | But when you look at, like, the most successful people in the world, that's not really what they're doing. |
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