ANALYSIS: Causation in Social Media Torts Won’t Flummox Courts

Causation will be a messy thing to prove in the social media lawsuits to come—messier than it was in tobacco litigation. But products liability determination is always muddled, and torts need be neither tidy nor uniform to be adjudicated. When wading through this muck, courts understand proximate cause as a framework for connecting foreseeable risks to resulting harms across complex chains of events—a framework suitable for both tobacco and social media mass torts.

Uniformity and Utility

Tobacco litigation was hardly immune from individualized causation questions. Courts routinely confronted plaintiffs with preexisting conditions, environmental exposures, and competing behavioral risk factors. Plaintiffs ...