ANALYSIS: Why Social Media Litigation Will Change the Game

For all of its precedents—the Master Settlement Agreement, the billion-dollar recoveries, the advertising restrictions and warning labels, and the decades of legal wrangling over addiction and disease—the most consequential effect of the tobacco litigation of the 1990s and 2000s was neither legal nor financial. It was cultural.

How impending social media litigation will affect the fortunes of social media companies remains to be seen. But they will face a similar cultural reckoning to what Big Tobacco companies faced in the wake of their cases.

From Product to Pariah

Tobacco litigation could only have happened after the centuries it took ...