Courts Must Stick To The Science On Digital Addiction Claims
Originally published by Law360In recent years, there has been an ongoing series of personal injury and product liability lawsuits alleging that the use of certain digital products and services is causing plaintiffs to develop behavioral addictions, including to social media and video games.
These cases raise threshold questions that have yet to be addressed — including whether frequent use of social media or video games is even an addiction, and if so, whether such an addiction is a compensable injury.
In 2023, in In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California skipped this foundational inquiry, and went straight to allegations regarding causation: "The allegations are rooted in academic studies empirically demonstrating causal connections."[1]
As a result, the litigation survived a motion to dismiss, and is now in fact discovery.
But early last year, in Mai v. Supercell Oy, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pointed out, in dicta, that "gaming addictions" are "intangible harms" and might not be "cognizable" injuries.[2]
Eventually, a plaintiff claiming to suffer from digital addiction will be required to submit expert evidence establishing that they suffer from that condition, and that exposure to the product or service at issue caused the development of the condition. While there may be some academic studies discussing the potential for digital addiction, frequent digital use patterns are not currently recognized as an addiction or disease.
The concern in the medical community is that there is a profound risk of overdiagnosing frequent digital use as addiction through biased self-assessments, an overemphasis on dopamine release, and a faulty comparison between the potential negative effects of spending too much time using digital products or services — e.g., bad grades — with the consequences associated with alcohol and drug addiction — e.g., jail, homelessness, overdose.
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