Ground-breaking liability case for website
Addiction Economy Thought For Today - is about how looking at the same information from different perspectives results in different responses.
The UK government and anti-smoking establishment views vapes through the lens of a tool to help smokers quit (see previous posts). Understandably as it kills more people than anything else. But at the same time, a policy goal is to prevent non-smoking children and adults vaping - they are by far the biggest group of non-smoking vapers. Research by Harry Tattan-Birch, Ph.D. from the Smoking Toolkit study shows as of July over 30% of young adults are vaping, with many more doing both smoking and vaping. That is a lot.
So here is the new NHS guidance for vapers (in the quit-smoking section of the site). If you read it you can see it is designed specifically for smokers so they are not put off from taking up vapes to help them quit. Excellent. Those are the questions they might be asking, the concerns they have and that's what the NHS and government want them to to know so they feel confident they can use vapes to wean them off the cigs.
Now, read it again with the eyes of, say 16 year old girl, or a 22 year old man, who vape for fun, and because everyone else is doing it. Every single point is irrelevant. These do not reflect the effects of vaping in their lives. These are not the questions they are asking. These are not the things they are worried about. These are not the things we want them to know about vapes.
Remember for them vapes are not remotely connected with smoking. A quote from a 22 year old from our research: “Vaping has nothing to do with smoking. It’s a lifestyle thing, a youth thing. A vape is sort of like an accessory.”
This focus on smokers and what increasingly seems to Joe Woof and I like wilful blindness about the problem of vaping by young adults and children is getting worrying. The Addiction Economy Thought for Today: About enforcing company liability for harms.
One of the issues which lets companies profit at the expense of their customers is because they are not held accountable or liable for the harms they cause. So profits rise concurrently with harms and the tab is picked up by taxpayers. Whether it be gambling levy's or polluter pays policies, accountability mechanisms have been hard to enforce, for lots of reasons.
Social media companies in particular have been successful in evading any liability for the harm done by their platforms by pleading that their users are nutters and it's not their fault.
Here is a legal landmark case in the US where 'chat' site Omegle has been totally shut down. "It is a legal landmark, as most social media lawsuits in the US are dismissed under a catch-all protection law called Section 230, which exempts companies from being sued for things that users do on their platforms.
"Alice's attorneys used a novel angle of attack called a Product Liability lawsuit, arguing that the site was defective in its design.
"This was the first case where the platform could be held liable for the harm from one user to another and that's largely because of our argument that the product design made the type of harm so foreseeable," says attorney Carrie Goldberg, who led the case with co-counsels Naomi Leeds and Barb Long.
Product Liability cases are a growing trend, with dozens of similar suits launched in the last year against platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat."
Not knowing about this, I wrote about this on a blog for Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs website a while ago, arguing that large language models were a defective product and should be subject to immediate product recall. It was a bit tongue in cheek at the time, but it appears it is happening in lots of places already!information for young non-smokers either irrelevant or patronising, looking like it's been created by an adult who doesn't understand them. We must do better.
Anyone interested in funding a group of young people, behavioural scientists, vaping and smoking cessations specialist and communicators to do much better, do DM me or email hilary@societyinside.com.