ANALYSIS: Platforms Are Like Cigarettes: Next Stop, Liability

Let me begin by anticipating Travis’s argument that a website is not a cigarette and an algorithm is not a combustible cylindrical object. Even though courts are still defining what an algorithm is, I’ll concede that an algorithm and a cigarette have nothing in common.

But at the same time, within the context of the K.G.M. verdict, an algorithm and a cigarette have quite a lot in common: Both are alleged to be designed in ways that create and sustain dependency through repeated exposure.

Trends come and go, but tort professors still teach the classics. They teach Palsgraf v. Long ...