Social Media is hurting people. Can they sue?
Millions of people have experienced cyberbullying, online harassment, or found themselves unable to stop scrolling despite being aware that it is making them feel worse. Research shows these morbid technological experiences can cause real diagnosable mental health conditions, like clinical depression, anxiety disorders, and PTSD.
So here's the question: can those people take the companies responsible to court?
Right now, in the UK, the answer is mostly no. And the reason is surprisingly old fashioned.
The law was written in an earlier age
English law has a set of rules for when someone can claim compensation for psychiatric harm caused by another person's negligence. The problem? Those rules were developed entirely through cases involving physical accidents including, car crashes, train disasters, and the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy
To win a claim for psychiatric harm, courts currently require all of the following:
1. A sudden, horrifying event, not gradual harm that builds over time
2. Physical closeness to that event
3. Witnessing it directly with your own eyes, not through a screen
The issue: Cyberbullying doesn't happen in a single moment. Online harassment builds over months or even years. Additionally, social media develops over years. Therefore, none of that fits 'sudden shock'. The law's rules exclude the way digital harms actually works.
Three Gaps & Three Fixes
My Laidlaw research paper identifies three specific ways current law fails to compensate people harmed by digital technologies and proposes three ways to fix them.
Gap 1: No sudden moment. Digital harm is accumulated. The law says there must be a single shocking event. I argue courts should follow Australia's lead where the Supreme Court removed this requirement in 2002, and it worked fine.
Gap 2: Platforms hide behind 'passive hosting'. Social media companies claim they are just 'hosting services' meaning they should not be held accountable. But when an algorithm decides which posts to show a vulnerable teenager to keep them scrolling - that's an active choice, not passive hosting. This distinction, therefore, matters legally.
Gap 3: The evidence is locked away. To prove a platform caused harm, you need their internal data. Facebook's own research, which was leaked in 2021, showed they knew their apps were harming young users. But without a whistleblower, claimants cannot access that proof. I argue that the law should require platforms to disclose it in court.
This isn't just academic
In March 2026, a US jury found Instagram and Youtube negligent for designing platforms that addicted a young woman, causing depression and body dysmorphia. The UK has no equivalent case yet, partly because our law makes it so hard to being one.
However, the Law Commission (the official body that reviews UK law) recommended reforming psychiatric rules back in 1988, but Parliament never acted on it. My research argues that digital harm makes these reforms more urgent than ever, and that court's don't even need to wait for Parliament, they can act on their own and start updating these laws.