Personal rights: liability: social media platforms.

Senator Stern, alongside several coauthors, advances a measure that would place a new civil-penalty framework on the largest social media platforms to address civil-rights violations that are caused, facilitated, or contributed to by their algorithms. The core change creates private liability for platforms with annual gross revenues exceeding a defined threshold when their algorithms relay content in ways that violate protected-rights provisions, with the regime becoming operative in 2027 and protected by severability and a prohibition on waivers.

Key mechanisms center on a defined class of platforms and a per-violation penalty structure tied to the level of fault. A platform is defined as a social media platform with more than a $100 million annual gross revenue, using a cross-reference to an existing corporate code for its definitional standard. For violations of specified civil-rights provisions that occur through the platform’s algorithms, or in which the platform is a joint tortfeasor, the bill authorizes civil penalties in addition to any other remedies. Penalties range up to $1 million per intentional, knowing, or willful violation, up to $500,000 per reckless violation, and may be doubled if the plaintiff is a minor. The bill treats deploying an algorithm that relays content as an act of the platform and presumes actual knowledge of the algorithm’s operations, including differential delivery to users, with penalties awarded to a prevailing plaintiff.

Enforcement relies on private civil actions rather than agency enforcement, and the penalties are described as payable to the prevailing plaintiff. The act requires a fiscal analysis by a committee but contains no explicit appropriation, leaving the disposition of collected penalties unspecified. The operative date anchors when the liability regime may be invoked, while severability and a public-policy waiver clause ensure that invalid provisions do not disable the remainder of the act.

Findings accompanying the bill frame the rationale as protecting civil-rights in the digital sphere without regulating speech, citing trends in hate- and violence-related harms and the potential for algorithmic delivery to facilitate violations. The measure foregrounds a relationship to existing civil-rights statutes rather than amending those provisions, and it situates its new framework alongside, rather than in place of, current obligations such as terms-of-service disclosures. Implementation considerations include evidentiary questions about proving algorithmic knowledge and causation, potential data-access issues, and how the revenue threshold would be measured, all within a transition period that precedes the 2027 operative date and within a landscape of ongoing civil-rights enforcement.