On June 12, 2025, an Air India plane crash killed 241 people en route to London.[1] The accident made international news and prompted an international investigation.[2] Understanding the cause of the crash was essential to prevent future accidents: If it was the result of pilot error, improved training and screening of pilots could reduce the chance of future deaths. If the aircraft was defective, the manufacturer and Air India could improve the design of their planes and maintenance programs.

The process of assigning blame is not limited to the professional or scientific spheres, though. Litigation will lead courts to make judicial decisions based upon blameworthiness. Travelers will make decisions about how to get to London in the future, and those decisions will be influenced by accidents. Will those travelers be less likely to take an Air India flight in the future?

A large firm like Boeing raises particular concerns. Boeing planes have been involved in a variety of accidents in the past few years, including a window blowout on an Alaskan Airlines flight in 2024.[3] The company’s size assures that any accident involving it will attract attention, even if no one dies, as was the fortunate case with the Alaskan Airlines flight. Regardless of whether regulatory authorities eventually fault Boeing for one accident, the public may come to view the company with suspicion given its repeated involvement in accidents. A related possibility, though, is that Boeing’s high profile in the aviation industry will prompt suspicion of air travel in general, fairly or not.

In a new article, I explore this broader impact of attribution and corporate accidents on society. Some large firms respond well to crises. Consider Johnson & Johnson’s successful resolution of a drug-tampering scare in the 1980s. The firm’s nationwide recall and packaging changes resolved consumer fears of tainted pharmaceutical products.[4]

Other large firms, however, face ongoing challenges, such as social media companies that have recurring breaches of consumer privacy.[5] If large firms fail to limit such breaches, the long-term effects upon society may be substantial. Consumers may come to lose any expectation of privacy for a number of reasons. First, their information may have been already exposed in a privacy breach by the large firm. Second, they may reason that if the large firm, with its substantial resources, was unable to protect their privacy, no one could do so. A shift in social norms or expectations may be the result of accidents by these large firms.

This shift in norms or expectations could drive a general loss of trust and use of social media at large. Moreover, it might stymie competition among social media firms: Consumers may distrust any firm’s claims to privacy, making it more difficult to innovate and improve upon a large firm’s accident rate. In the long term, this could result in a market where customers do not expect any privacy, and firms do not offer any privacy, even though both customers and firms would otherwise prefer privacy protection.

The potential for corporate accidents to shift social norms or expectations can be difficult to counteract. Accident investigations take time, and the public may draw its own inferences regardless of official announcements. Courts can be sensitive to this potential influence, though. As the Supreme Court recently discussed in Kousisis v. United States, proper analysis of fraud often requires an analysis of materiality: Some lies are not material to the listener and thus not actionable as fraud.[6]

Consider a large social media firm that claims it is the world leader in protecting user privacy but eventually reveals repeated, ongoing privacy breaches. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in Kousisis, one method of determining whether a representation is material is to see how someone who hears it reacts upon learning the truth.[7] The inference is that a listener who continues to take the same actions does not find the lie to be material. As I discuss above, though, listeners might not change their actions because of the impact of large corporate accidents. The fact that social media users continue to stay with a dominant social media firm despite repeated privacy breaches does not necessarily imply that they do not find those breaches material to their decision-making. A court that hastily labels problems as immaterial may exacerbate the societal impact of corporate accidents.

ENDNOTES

[1] https://apnews.com/article/india-plane-crash-cad8dad5cd0e92795b03d357404af5f8

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/world/asia/air-india-plane-crash-investigation-us.html

[3] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/06/1223280562/alaska-airlines-flight-emergency-landing-oregon

[4] Howard Markel, How the Tylenol Murders of 1982 Changed the Way We Consume Medication, PBS (Sept. 29, 2014, 11:39AM), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982.

[5] See Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison, Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach, The Guardian (Mar. 17, 2018, 6:03 PM), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election; In re Facebook Biometric Info. Priv. Litig., 522 F. Supp. 3d 617 (N.D. Cal. 2020).

[6] See 145 S. Ct. 1382 (2025).

[7] See id. (J. Thomas, concurring) at *5 (citing Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar, 579 U. S. 176, 195 (2016) (“A party’s actions may reveal that a contract term is not material even if the contract’s language would suggest otherwise. For example, ‘if the Government regularly pays a particular type of claim in full despite actual knowledge that certain requirements were violated, and has signaled no change in its position, that is strong evidence that the requirements are not material.’”)

This post comes to us from Professor David Y. Kwok at the University of Houston Law Center. It is based on his recent article, “Accidental Corporate Social Norms,” available here.