The Evolution of Cyber Tort Liability: Conceptual Challenges in Algorithm-Induced Harm

Abstract

The rapid advancement of algorithmic and autonomous decision-making systems has fundamentally reshaped the nature, sources, and pathways of harm in the digital age, challenging the foundational assumptions of traditional tort law. As machine learning, predictive analytics, and neural networks increasingly influence medical, commercial, administrative, and social environments, legal systems struggle to reconcile long-standing doctrines with emerging forms of injury that arise from opaque, adaptive, and probabilistic computational processes. This narrative review adopts a descriptive–analytic approach to examine the historical evolution of cyber tort liability, beginning with early internet harms such as defamation, intrusion, software negligence, and cybersecurity breaches, and moving through transitional phases marked by platform liability debates and the growing influence of algorithmic content curation. The review then analyzes the conceptual and doctrinal tensions exposed by algorithm-induced harms, including challenges of causation, foreseeability, duty of care, standard of reasonableness, attribution, vicarious liability, and the classification of algorithms as products, services, or sui generis entities. It further surveys emerging regulatory responses across jurisdictions, including the European Union’s risk-based AI governance approach, the fragmented U.S. reliance on traditional tort principles and platform immunity, the nuanced common-law adaptations in the UK, Canada, and Australia, and Asia’s increasingly administrative models of algorithmic oversight. International soft-law instruments are also examined for their role in harmonizing global approaches. The review concludes that algorithmic systems generate structural contradictions within tort doctrine, revealing the need for conceptual reframing and new liability models that can accommodate distributed agency, systemic harms, and technological opacity. These insights offer a foundation for future legal scholarship and policy development aimed at ensuring accountability in an era defined by autonomous digital systems.