For years, technology companies faced relatively limited legal liability for harms linked to their products — shielded largely by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and First Amendment protections. Courts are increasingly allowing these cases to proceed, with hundreds of lawsuits against social media platforms and generative AI chatbot companies advancing into discovery and trial. Now, for the first time, courts must decide what accountability for technology-related harms actually looks like.

As judges confront these new challenges, the USC Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, in collaboration with the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) and Tech Justice Law, has developed a framework to assess responsibility and oversight.

“Courts are now in a position to do something genuinely important: require that technology companies compete on whether their products actually make people’s lives better, not just whether they keep people engaged,” said Ravi Iyer, managing director of the USC Marshall Neely Center and a co-author of the report. “This framework gives litigators and courts the tools to make that happen in a durable, enforceable way.”

Designing Technology Remedies: Lessons for Social Media and Generative AI Chatbot Litigation offers a practical, evidence-based framework to help litigators, courts, and policymakers identify and implement effective and enforceable remedies responsive to specific social media and AI chatbot harms — including allegations of addiction and compulsive use, unwanted contact, and privacy violations.

The report argues financial penalties alone are unlikely to make users safer or meaningfully change corporate practices. Past lawsuits involving tobacco, opioid, and e-cigarette makers, and civil rights violations suggest that lasting reform in company conduct typically combines injunctive relief with monetary damages. The same logic, the authors argue, applies to tech.

The framework draws from a systematic review of nearly 100 prior remedies, including Federal Trade Commission consent decrees, public health litigation, civil rights settlements, and technology-related cases — further informed by stakeholder interviews and multidisciplinary convenings involving state attorneys general, plaintiffs’ attorneys, technologists, researchers, and legal scholars.

The result is a framework organized around three mutually reinforcing categories of remedies:

• Harm prevention remedies target how companies design, develop, and deploy their products in the first place — including prohibitions on unsafe design features, safer default settings for minors, and meaningful restrictions on data collection.

• Harm mitigation remedies focus on giving users real tools to protect themselves: accessible parental controls, account and data deletion, and user-reporting systems that actually close the loop.

• Governance remedies address how companies make decisions internally — requiring senior compliance officers with real authority, independent external monitors, and transparency mechanisms that allow outside researchers to scrutinize platform behavior.