Tech's Bill Comes Due

A billionaire getting served outside a courthouse, a public fight about social media harm, and an AI CEO summoned to the Pentagon. Accountability is having quite a February.

There’s a moment in any long-running story about power and accountability when the abstract becomes real, when the thing everyone knew must be happening in the background starts happening in public, maybe even in front of cameras. February so far has felt like one of those moments, because this month we’re seeing several accountability mechanisms activated at once.

The Courts

The social media trial underway in Los Angeles is the first of an estimated 1,600 cases making a specific legal argument: that Section 230 — the federal provision that has shielded platforms from liability for user-generated content for three decades — doesn’t protect a company that deliberately engineered addictive behavior. The plaintiff is a 20-year-old woman who argues that Meta’s design choices, not its content, set off a pattern of harm that has shaped her life. Her lawyers aren’t arguing about what people posted. They’re arguing about the machine that decided what she saw, how often, and for how long.

This distinction matters enormously. Here’s why…