One afternoon last summer, Matthew Bergman sat on a bench outside a courtroom in downtown Manhattan. The founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) was there representing a client named Norma Nazario. Her 15-year-old son, Zackery, died in February 2023 while “subway surfing”—riding on the outside of a moving Brooklyn-bound J train, a stunt his mother believes was encouraged by his social media algorithm. Bergman was representing Nazario in a lawsuit against TikTok and Instagram, which alleges Zackery was “targeted, goaded and encouraged” to engage in subway surfing because of their products’ “unreasonably dangerous design.” As the sun streamed through the windows of the court building, the lawyer let out a long sigh and jiggled his leg. Then he turned his yellow legal pad to an empty page, wrote “230” in the center of the page, and drew a circle around the number.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Bergman spends his time suing social-media companies, but Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act is his other adversary. The 1996 law provides broad immunity for digital communication platforms, largely shielding them from liability over the content they host. For years, those protections have frustrated parents, lawyers, advocates, and mental-health professionals who say the statute prevents attempts to hold companies accountable for the alleged harms suffered by users of their platforms.
In recent years, Bergman has become one of the go-to lawyers for families who say their children have been harmed by social media. His clients include the parents of kids who have died by suicide and drug overdoses, kids who have allegedly been groomed and sexually abused by predators they met online, and kids who have developed debilitating anorexia. Last week, the SMVLC filed seven cases against OpenAI, three of which involved individuals who had allegedly been encouraged to commit suicide by ChatGPT. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
To advance many of these cases, Bergman has promoted and deployed a pioneering strategy to circumvent Section 230. If the platforms can’t be held responsible for the content they host, Bergman argues, they can instead be sued for alleged negligence in their design and FOR allegedly misleading the public about the safety of their products. This tactic—applying so-called product-liability theory to social-media platforms—has formed the basis of thousands of lawsuits he’s filed in state and federal courts around the country. Over the past four years, he has taken on all the major players in social media, from Instagram to TikTok to Snapchat. (Meta, TikTok, and Snap all declined to comment for this story.)
Read More: Social Media Led To An Eating Disorder. Now She’s Suing.
Bergman isn’t the first to sue digital platforms on these grounds. A product-liability suit against Myspace in 2009 and another against Grindr in 2017 were both dismissed because of Section 230. It’s not yet clear whether Bergman will succeed either. But he has become the most famous proponent of the theory, amassing more than 4,000 clients and making him one of the go-to lawyers for families who say social-media platforms have exposed their children to irreparable harm. In the process, he’s transforming a legal battle against some of America’s most formidable companies into a movement for digital justice.
“He has raised the profile of this issue tremendously,” says Previn Warren of Motley Rice, the co-lead plaintiffs’ attorney in a federal multidistrict litigation against social-media companies that includes more than 1,300 of Bergman’s clients. “He’s done an incredible job uniting these families and rallying them together and making them a powerful political lobbying force.”
So far, roughly 1,500 of Bergman’s social-media cases have been allowed to proceed despite Section 230, and many of those are bundled in larger lawsuits moving through state and federal court. Yet it seems that Section 230 is not as impenetrable as it once appeared. “It was long thought that Section 230 was like this immovable beast,” says Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School and Vice President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “What we’ve seen is a chink in that armor.”
Not everyone is convinced of the legal merits of Bergman’s approach. “Product liability was designed to cover physical products that cause personal injury, like Coke bottles that explode and take people’s eyes out,” says Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law. Online harms, he says, are impossible for digital platforms to prevent. “If we establish liability for those kinds of harms,” Goldman says, “those risks are legally unmanageable.”
So far, Bergman has settled only one social-media case out of court, and that was for seven figures. But he says in all his years as a plaintiffs’ lawyer, he has never had clients who cared less about financial damages. Instead, he hopes that his cascade of lawsuits will force the industry to change its business practices and make their products safer for kids.
“Kids are dying every day. This is not simply a question of seeking recompense for past wrongs,” he says. “This is a moral crusade to stop the killing.”
When he’s in New York, which isn’t very often, Bergman lives in a pre-war two-bedroom on the Upper East Side. He has a signed Picasso print on his wall, and fragments of hieroglyphics in his living room next to ancient Roman pottery. On the day I visited, we ate turkey sandwiches surrounded by original Andy Warhol prints of Gertrude Stein, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. As he sipped seltzer at his dining-room table, dressed in a bluish-purple patterned suit with an orange-patterned tie, Bergman vacillated between taciturn and vehement. “Clearly, moral suasion hasn’t worked,” he says of the social-media companies. “Clearly, public humiliation hasn’t worked. Bad PR hasn’t worked,” he adds. The only way to change these companies, he says, is “if they have to pay the cost.”
Bergman grew up in Seattle, the son of a prominent Jewish physician. His grandfather was a lawyer who kept a book of Clarence Darrow’s closing arguments on his bookshelf. Bergman grew up idolizing the famed attorney. He dreamed of being like Darrow: “the spokesperson for the voiceless,” he says. He quit college in 1982 to go to New York to live as a “bohemian socialist,” as he puts it, and did a stint at the AFL-CIO. Bergman ultimately went back to college, graduated in 1986, and headed to law school. Then came a clerkship on the 10th Circuit and a job at a big law firm in Seattle.
It was there that he tried his first asbestos case, on the defense side. But two years later he decided to switch to the plaintiffs’ side, representing people who were sick or dying because of exposure to the dangerous minerals. His job often involved taking emotional depositions from plaintiffs who might die before their case reached trial. In time, he came to run one of the preeminent asbestos-litigation firms in the Pacific Northwest, spending 30 years suing asbestos companies and recovering over $1 billion in damages on behalf of his clients.
By the fall of 2021, Bergman was ready to hand the baton to his younger partners. He was feeling restless and wanted to try something new. He didn’t feel like Clarence Darrow anymore. Meanwhile, he had noticed the cracks beginning to appear in Section 230. In May 2021, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Lemmon v. Snap that Section 230 didn’t protect Snap from litigation over negligent product design. On Oct. 4 of that year, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified to Congress that the company was aware of the mental-health risks its product posed to kids.
Read More: Inside Frances Haugen’s Decision To Take on Facebook.
The day after Haugen’s testimony, Bergman says he accidentally took 20 mg of Ambien before driving to the ferry in his small island community near Seattle. He fell asleep at the wheel, crashed into an embankment and flipped his car. The car was totaled, but Bergman walked away unscathed. “I should have died,” he says. Instead, the accident gave him a new sense of purpose. A month later, he set up the SMVLC, the first and only firm focused exclusively on suing social-media companies on behalf of kids.
He sees similarities in his past adversaries and his new ones. “The asbestos companies knew that their products were killing people and deliberately hid the evidence and skewed the scientific literature,” he says. “That’s exactly what the social-media companies were doing.”
Bergman hired a partner, Laura Marquez-Garrett, a Harvard-educated corporate litigator who took a six-figure pay cut to join him. In the beginning, she says, Bergman paid her salary from his own savings account. But Marquez-Garrett believed in the mission—“I said: if you go bankrupt tomorrow, I will liquidate my 401k and work for you for free”—and wanted to work with families to tell their stories rather than simply chase billable hours.
“It’s not just the court of law, it’s also the court of public opinion,” she says. “And we need to win in both.”
One of the first emails Bergman got at the Social Media Victims Law Center was from a Connecticut single mom named Tammy Rodriguez. Rodriguez said that her daughter Selena had become addicted to Snapchat when she was 9. Selena would become physically violent if her phone was taken away, Rodriguez says. If she turned off the WiFi, Selena would run out of the house to find WiFi somewhere else.
Soon, Rodriguez says, Selena was getting Snapchat messages from strangers online. She received dick picks and started getting sexually groomed by adults. Eventually, Selena became suicidal and was hospitalized. In July 2021, Selena filmed herself taking an overdose of antidepressants and posted it on Snapchat. She died at age 11. Snap did not respond to a request for comment on Rodriguez’s case.
In the months that followed Selena’s death, Tammy Rodriguez couldn’t sleep. She spent her days and nights scrolling through her grief. She came across an ad for the SMVLC, and became one of the new firm’s first clients, filing a suit against Snap, Meta, and TikTok. Eventually, Rodriguez joined fellow plaintiffs in Washington to lobby Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. “When [Mark] Zuckerberg had to stand up and apologize,” Bergman says now with a hint of a smile, “those were my clients he was talking to.”
Rodriguez’s case is also part of the multidistrict litigation currently working its way through federal court in Northern California. Bergman and the other plaintiffs’ attorneys on the case hope it will ultimately force tech behemoths to change their business models to reduce teen addiction and protect kids online. “We aimed to impose the same economic pressure on social media companies that every other company in America has, which is a duty to design a product that isn’t defective,” Bergman says. “Every other company has to face liability. Why doesn’t social media?”
Read More: ‘Everything I Learned About Suicide, I Learned On Instagram.’
Rodriguez says she hasn’t paid the firm a fee of any kind, and has never discussed recovering financial damages from the companies. “I’ve never asked about money,” says Rodriguez. “To me, that’s not the focus of the lawsuit. I want to hold the company accountable.” Bergman says this is typical of his clients. “They want justice, they want accountability, and they want to prevent more families from suffering what they did.”
Rodriguez says litigation has given her an outlet for her grief. She has stopped blaming herself and her family for her daughter’s death. “Now,” she says, “I’m able to direct my anger to the right people.”
