The op-ed you are about to read was purchased. Cory L. Andrews, general counsel at the Washington Legal Foundation, published in the Wall Street Journal his argument that Social-Media Regulation Doesn’t Belong in Court — the science is unsettled, public nuisance is a legal monster, and the states’ $1.4 trillion case against Meta for designing platforms to addict children should be decided by Congress, not a jury. The Washington Legal Foundation, which pays his salary, is funded by a network of corporations and foundations with a documented interest in limiting liability for technology, communications, and other regulated industries — a fact Mr. Andrews does not mention. His organization’s own 990 filings, as aggregated by public nonprofit databases, show contributions from the same network of donors that has funded the legal defense of every industry that made people sick and got rich doing it.
Now let’s talk about whose business plan we are reading.
The Washington Legal Foundation is the legal arm of the identical playbook that the tobacco industry ran, that the opioid industry ran, that the lead-paint industry ran, that the gun industry ran. Every time a product makes people sick and the tort system catches up, here comes the same brief: the science isn’t settled, the courtroom is the wrong venue, this is really a question for Congress. The first time, it was the tobacco companies paying $206 billion under the Master Settlement Agreement — and the lawyers took their billions, and the industry absorbed the rest as a cost of doing business without stopping the sale of cigarettes. The second time, it was the opioid industry settling for $26 billion after the bodies had piled up. The third time, it was the lead-paint manufacturers, whom a California court found liable for creating a public nuisance that had poisoned children for decades. The fourth time, it was the gun industry, and the Sandy Hook families settled with Remington for $73 million — the smallest figure in the catalogue, and the hardest: $73 million to avoid a trial that would have forced the industry to answer for how it marketed weapons to civilians.
The list is the same every time. The mechanism is the same every time. And the result is the same every time: the industry pays a fraction of what it made, changes nothing about the product, and writes the next check to the next legal foundation to write the next brief.
Congress, which has held hearings on children’s safety online for more than a decade and passed nothing that would meaningfully constrain a platform’s design choices, is the forum Mr. Andrews wants this decided in. The same Congress where the Washington Legal Foundation’s clients file the campaign contributions and the lobbying registrations. The same Congress that cannot pass a federal privacy law, cannot pass a children’s online safety bill that has teeth, and cannot pass a law that would force a platform to stop feeding the algorithm your child’s loneliness because loneliness keeps the screen lit.
“Public nuisance was among the dullest legal actions,” Mr. Andrews writes. “A pig loose on the highway.” This is a man who has never had to watch hundreds of school districts file nuisance suits against the same companies because the children cannot put the phones down and cannot learn and cannot sleep. The school districts have the discipline records. They have the referrals. They have the children. And they have no other door to knock on, because Congress has not opened its door, and the industry has paid to keep it closed.
The $1.4 trillion in penalties the states are seeking against Meta is what the harm is worth to the people who caused it. The company will settle for a fraction of that, of course. They always do. The lawyers will make their billions. The Washington Legal Foundation will write the next brief. And the algorithm that learned your daughter’s loneliness will continue to learn it, because Congress will not act and the courts are the only door left, and Mr. Andrews would very much like you to believe that the door should not open.
It isn’t a monster. It’s the oldest story in the book. The same playbook, filed against every industry that made people sick and got rich doing it. The same brief, arguing that the venue is wrong and the science unsettled. And the same result: hundreds of school districts, each with its own children, having to file a lawsuit because the alternative — the one the Washington Legal Foundation prefers — has never worked.