Platform Liability for Platform Manipulation

Platform manipulation is a growing phenomenon affecting billions of internet users globally. Malicious actors leverage the functions and features of online platforms to deceive users, secure financial gain, inflict material harms, and erode the public?s trust. Although social media companies benefit from a safe harbor for their content policies, no state or federal law clearly ascribes liability to platforms complicit in deception by their designs. Existing frameworks fail to accommodate for the unique role design choices play in enabling, amplifying, and monitoring platform manipulation. As a result, platform manipulation continues to grow with few meaningful legal avenues of recourse available to victims. This Note introduces a paradigm of corporate liability for social media platforms that facilitate platform manipulation. It argues that courts must appreciate platform design as a dimension of corporate conduct by explicating the extension of common law tort liability to platform design. This Platform Design Negligence (PDN) paradigm crucially clarifies the bounds of accountability for the design choices of social media companies and is well-suited to respond to the law?s systemic discounting of platform design. Existing legal frameworks fail to account for the unique and content-agnostic enmeshment between platforms and those who manipulate platforms to abuse users. PDN in turn offers a constitutive baseline for a society with less rampant technology-enabled deception.