Bad news: We lost control of our social media feeds - Good news: Courts are noticing

A case in the US involving TikTok may have opened the door to holding platforms liable for the damage they cause.

- Julia Angwin

During a recent rebranding tour, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, sporting Gen Z-approved tousled hair, streetwear and a gold chain, let the truth slip: Consumers no longer control their social media feeds. Meta's algorithm, he boasted, has improved to the point that it is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with, and he sees a future in which feeds show you “content that's generated by an AI system”.

Spare me. There's nothing I want less than a bunch of memes of pie-eating cartoon cats and other artificial intelligence (AI) slop added to all the clickbait already clogging my feed. But there is a silver lining: The US legal system is starting to recognise this shift and hold tech giants responsible for the effects of their algorithms – a significant, and even possibly transformative, development that, over the next few years, could finally force social media platforms to be answerable for the societal consequences of their choices.

Let's back up and start with the problem. Section 230, a snippet of law embedded in the US 1996 Communications Decency Act, was initially intended to protect tech companies from defamation claims related to posts made by users.

That protection made sense in the early days of social media, when we largely chose the content we saw, based on whom we “friended” on sites such as Facebook. Since we selected those relationships, it was relatively easy for the companies to argue they should not be blamed if your Uncle Bob insulted your strawberry pie on Instagram.