Marketplace Tech · Thursday, July 16, 2026
The legal approach against Meta in the $1.4 trillion lawsuit is compared to the historical fight against big tobacco. Legal expert Gaia Bernstein notes that the strategy involves consumer protection laws, arguing that addictive features misled users and that companies hid harm. The comparison highlights that, similar to tobacco, the social media issue is not a single solution but a multitude of efforts, with the massive financial damages sought aiming to exert pressure for a settlement.
“You and of course, many others have sort of compared this moment for social media to what happened with big tobacco. How do these legal efforts kind of compare?”
“The first thing I saw from looking at the history of tobacco is that it was never one thing. Never there was not one magic bullet that solved the problem. It was lots of things.”
“So I think if we think about this, this is not really a mathematical issue. You know, how much money exactly, the Attorney General is going to receive in this lawsuit. What's important here is that it's a lot of money. And it exerts such pressure that you finally get into a settlement.”