ne 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.
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.
