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USC Marshall’s Neely Center Co-Develops New Framework to Guide Social Media and AI Accountability in Courts

USC Marshall’s Neely Center Co-Develops New Framework to Guide Social Media and AI Accountability in Courts

New framework offers courts and litigators a practical, evidence-based roadmap for crafting enforceable remedies in the wave of lawsuits now targeting social media and generative AI companies.

06.09.26
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  • Ravi Iyer

    Ravi Iyer
    • Managing Director, Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making
    • Managing Director, Psychology of Technology Institute
  • Nathanael Fast

    Nathanael Fast
    • Professor of Management and Organization
    • Director of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making
    • Co-Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute

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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.

This framework gives litigators and courts the tools to make that happen in a durable, enforceable way.

— Ravi Iyer

Managing Director, Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making

The framework is intentionally flexible: not every remedy will apply in every case, and the appropriate approach will depend on the specific harms, the nature of the defendant’s product, and the procedural posture of the litigation. It is equally direct about what doesn’t work. Standalone employee training requirements and limited consent-based approaches to data use, for instance, consistently underperform as standalone remedies.

“The promise of social media and AI was never just to capture our attention,” said Nathanael Fast, director of the Neely Center. “It was to genuinely improve how we live, learn, and work. This framework gives courts a way to steer these products back toward that purpose, rewarding companies that build technology around what people actually need rather than exploiting their weaknesses.”

For the Neely Center, whose mission centers on ethical leadership and decision-making in business, the work represents a natural extension of what it means to hold powerful institutions accountable — and the implications extend well beyond individual cases. The remedies emerging from this wave of litigation are expected to catalyze future lawsuits, inform regulation, and shape technology governance in the U.S. and globally.

The full report, Designing Technology Remedies: Lessons for Social Media and Generative AI Chatbot Litigation, is available through the Knight-Georgetown Institute.

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