I suspect it’s less a general social trend and more a cohort of litigious profiteers looking to make a quick buck.

It's the sum of both - your textbook cohort of litigious profiteers, now with the perfect social trend excuse so they can redouble their efforts and mask the profiteering as social justice. Expect to see much more of this going forward.

I'm happy having thirsty lawyers act as part of society's enforcement against bad corporate behavior. It'd be better if the government did it first, but I'll take what I can get.

This. I'm against profiteering as much as the next guy, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. If they can curb these dubious practices, good for them.

Yeesh, it's sad how effective corporate propaganda is to see efforts to take companies to task for lying to consumers described this way.

It's not very compelling evidence (just three selected data points), but the article states:

> According to Perkins Coie, a law firm that tracks such cases, 214 class-action lawsuits were filed against the food and beverage industry in 2022, and 331 cases were brought the year before.

> It's a major uptick from the 81 cases filed in 2014, less than a decade earlier.

I was wondering the same. Maybe there is just an uptick in legal firms taking interest in bringing suits because it has proven to be a viable business? The article points out these firms exist, but "increase in one form of lawyering over the last decade" isn't nearly as sexy as "Fed-up consumers are increasingly going after x"

> This suggests a social trend of...

> Is there evidence...

No. But I have seen nothing to suggest a social trend of pushing back against wishful reporting.

Or one could view such embellishments as low-dose mood meds, added to keep people from getting too depressed, due to chronic over-consumption of news...