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

Richard, welcome to your own show. It's always a pleasure to join you, Charlie.

All right.

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

And today's topic is, well, I think something of a crazy story out of, well, of all places, California.

A Los Angeles jury yesterday found Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google,

which everybody knows, liable for the suicidal ideation and depression of a young lady after she claimed

that she had become addicted to Instagram, owned by Matter, and YouTube owned by Google at a young age,

and that jury ordered those

companies to pay a combined $6 million in damages. Richard, first off, what is happening

here? There's no law that allows people to seek damages in this manner.

And Section 230, at least, I thought, was supposed to stop this.

So under what rules was this case brought and litigated in the first instance?

Well, my guess is, as I haven't looked at it detailed,

is that this was brought as a common law action in which the claim was that you essentially

provided people with deadly information

of which they were not aware, which led to their demise or to their serious illness, and that you were

responsible for that. It turns out that two potential people who could be liable, there could be

those people who produce the content, and there could be those people

who start to transmit it, and that would be a rough distinction between Google on the one hand

and YouTube on the other. And the theory is, since they're doing all of this, there is no

effective regulatory response against it so that you need to have private rights of action. So the way in which the lawyers will typically argue this case is the exact opposite of what

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