Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment — with Yaël Eisenstat

In the wake of this week’s landmark $18 billion settlement with Meta, we’re bringing you an episode with Yaël Eisenstat, one of the leading thinkers on the issues at the heart of that case — and the many other recent legal challenges that may be fundamentally changing how we think about the power and responsibility of technology platforms.

In recent months, courts and juries across the country have been confronting questions that technology policy has wrestled with for years: When should platforms be held responsible for harms facilitated by their products? Where is the line between regulating speech and regulating product design? And what does it look like to build the legal cases that hold Big Tech accountable?

And after decades in which Section 230 and other legal protections often prevented these questions from reaching juries at all, are we witnessing the beginning of what we’re calling tech’s Big Tobacco moment?

In the episode, I speak with Yaël Eisenstat about the recent cases against Meta and other platforms, the years of research, journalism, whistleblowing, advocacy, and litigation that made this moment possible, and what happens when evidence about the consequences of technological design finally reaches ordinary jurors.

We also ask what these cases can—and cannot—accomplish. Can litigation succeed where legislation and regulation have struggled? Can social media actually be redesigned to serve the public interest, or are its harms inseparable from its underlying business model? And as our technological landscape shifts from social media toward increasingly personalized and intimate AI systems, are we building an accountability framework for the last technological era just as the next one arrives?

Yaël Eisenstat is the Director of Policy and Impact at the CyberSafety Research Center, where she works on policy approaches to holding online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. She previously served as Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology & Society and, in 2018, joined Facebook as its Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising. Before entering technology policy, Eisenstat spent 14 years in public service as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House adviser. She has since become a prominent advocate for greater transparency and accountability in the technology industry.