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Business Daily
Is this social media's 'Big Tobacco moment'?
00:17:28
We look at the fallout from the recent court ruling against Meta and Google
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- [00:00]
Gideon Long
This BBC podcast is supported by ads. Outside the uk
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Lily Jamali
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Gideon Long
Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long and today we're looking at the fallout from monumental court ruling in Los Angeles against social media companies Meta. The owner of Instagram and Google, which owns YouTube, were found liable for harming a young user's mental health by deliberately making their products addictive.
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Lily Jamali
We now know that they were manipulating our children for profits while we were watching and trying to keep our families safe.
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Jennifer Huddleston
They are the predators.
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Gideon Long
The tech companies deny the accusations and say they'll appeal. But lawyers say the verdict will send shockwaves far beyond Los Angeles, opening the floodgates to a wave of similar claims.
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Mark Lanier
This is a landmark moment. It will reverberate. I'll tell you this, if the jury had returned to no, the champagne corks would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta.
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Gideon Long
So is this, as some have suggested, a tobacco moment for big tech? Comparable to the time when the big cigarette companies were forced to acknowledge that that their products were harmful? Should social media companies be brought into line? And can they be? Or are they just too big, too wealthy, too powerful? If reforms can be agreed, what would a responsible social media landscape look like? That's what we're asking on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. A group of parents sit outside a courthouse in Los Angeles listening intently as inside the court the jury delivers its verdict in the case against Meta and Google.
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Jennifer Huddleston
I can't believe how far we have come.
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Lily Jamali
I cannot believe how far we've come. Incredible.
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Gideon Long
And it's great news. In their view, a 20 year old woman, Kaylee, has won her case against the social media firms whom she'd accused of ruining her childhood by getting her addicted to their platforms.
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Lily Jamali
Quite get it half the time, but this is going to help us in our efforts and educating the public, educating families in our communities and driving that change that we so desperately need on these platforms.
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Gideon Long
Within minutes, the verdict had gone viral.
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Energy Trust of Oregon Announcer
We are following breaking news. A verdict in the landmark case addressing the power and influence of social media. A Los Angeles jury today finding meta and YouTube negligent in the design or operation of their platforms and saying the companies failed to warn users of the dangers of their services. The jurors found that the tech giant's platforms harmed a young user with features that made her addicted and led to mental health problems.
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Gideon Long
Caylee initially took the case against four social media companies, Snap, TikTok, Google and Meta. Snap and TikTok settled out of court, but Google and Meta pressed ahead in court. Caylee said she'd started using Google's YouTube age 6 and met as Instagram at 9 and hadn't been blocked by either. Despite her age, she became anxious and depressed. She used social media filters to change the way she looked and has since been diagnosed with body dysmorphia. She blamed social media and the jury agreed. Mark Lanier was Caylee's lead lawyer.
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Mark Lanier
The verdict was a finding of liability on all counts against both meta and YouTube. They found that Meta was negligent in the way they designed and operated their platform. They found that Meta failed to give what a reasonable company should give as warnings. And they found that Meta's failure to operate their platform in a reasonably prudent fashion and to warn in a reasonably prudent fashion was a direct cause, substantial contributing factor to harming Kaylee to the tune of $3 million, which is not a rounding error. YouTube's defenses that they were just TV were shunned by the jury. And the jury said that YouTube, Google failed to operate YouTube in a reasonable fashion.
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Gideon Long
Meta responded. Here's its spokeswoman, Ashley Nicole Davis.
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Lily Jamali
We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as Every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.
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Gideon Long
The company, which in 20 years has grown to be worth more than a trillion dollars, maintains it wants teens to have safe, positive online experiences. But there's no doubt that it was a bad week for Mark Zuckerberg's company. The verdict came just a day after another jury in New Mexico found it liable for the way its platforms endange children and expose them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators. The share prices of both Google and Meta fell after the Los Angeles verdict, and it does feel as if we've maybe reached a turning point in the history of social media. Cayley's lawyer, Mark Lanier.
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Mark Lanier
Again, this is a landmark moment. It will reverberate. I'll tell you this, if the jury had returned to no, the champagne corks would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta. But instead, Mark Zuckerberg has to take a phone call and the only thing he's waiting for now is to find out if there are going to be punishment damages.
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Gideon Long
One of the key witnesses in the LA case was Arturo Behar, an executive at Meta for many years, the head of their care team. In fact, he left in 2021, disillusioned.
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Arturo Behar
Instagram was facilitating harm at a staggering scale. And so I took that directly to Mark Zuckerberg and the executive team. And much to my heartbreak, it turns out that they knew and they weren't doing anything about it. And that's one of the things that's coming to bear right now, is their knowledge of harm and their refusal to make things better. They do know of harm, significant staggering amounts. They know how many kids spend six hours a day on a school night. And so they love saying how good they are. But by each of their actions they show how terrible they are at it. And it's our kids that are paying the price.
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Gideon Long
This is Business daily from the BBC World Service.
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Energy Trust of Oregon Announcer
Energy Trust of Oregon, we know it isn't easy the tremendous weight of today's operating costs, working in cold, drafty spaces with inefficient heating systems or under lights that have seen brighter days. But we also know how to help you upgrade those systems, lower those costs and meet the demands of your business with smart, energy efficient solutions. Find cash incentives@energytrust.org Energy Trust of Oregon. More power to you. Support is available 24.
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Lily Jamali
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Gideon Long
I'm Gideon Long and Today we're looking at the fallout from the recent landmark court ruling against Meta and Google. The jury in Los Angeles concluded that in Cayley's case at least, there was clear evidence that social media had harmed her mental health and that the companies had deliberately made their platforms addictive. But that's one case. What's the evidence that social media impacts all young people negatively or that the negatives aren't outweighed by positives? After all, some young people say that social media platforms help them find like minded souls online or discover communities where they belong. Victoria Goodyear is a professor of physical activity, health and well being at the University of Birmingham in the uk.
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Victoria Goodyear
It's not clear cut, so we don't have a consistent pattern in the evidence that basically says that it causes harm or it promotes benefits. And one of the reasons for that is that there's not a causal evidence. So we haven't been able to test if social media causes harm at that stage. There is also variation in the evidence. So those studies that I've just talked about, they're population level evidence looking across all sorts of young people and across those aspects. But what we see is individual cases of harm. And so it's quite difficult to make decisions on this basis because at a population level the evidence doesn't support that there is definite or definitive harm. But individual level cases, there is some evidence. And the challenge is if we wait for better evidence, this could also cause harm. So it's a real challenge for decision makers.
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Gideon Long
And we've seen countries around the world, starting with Australia, saying that they are going to ban social media platforms for young people, blanket bans of some of these apps. Do you think the evidence is there to support that kind of policy?
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Victoria Goodyear
Not yet. I don't think the evidence is there yet. So bans on smartphones and social media have been advocated, as you've suggested, across many different countries, to protect children from the harm. And they've been advocated despite the evidence that these will have a positive effect.
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Gideon Long
Despite a lack of scientific consensus, politicians and regulators are pushing for tighter rules. And the verdict against Meta and Google has only galvanised support for changes. But Jennifer Huddleston, a technology and law expert from the libertarian think tank the Cato institute in Washington D.C. says that could have negative consequences.
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Jennifer Huddleston
Certainly we could see much more restrictive actions out of a fear that they could have further litigation over those decisions that they may make to carry health and wellness content or content about certain political issues, if it's something that's later could be deemed to be harmful to young people. Additionally, we could see platforms choose to turn off certain features that their users might like, like Autoplay, or we could even see some sort of, you know, attempt to create a warning label. It's a question that remains uncertain how platforms will react and whether it'll just be the platforms that were involved in this case, or if it'll be broader changes to other social media platforms.
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Gideon Long
You said that some of the platforms might be forced to turn off some of their features that actually users like, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean, maybe they should be forced to turn them off.
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Jennifer Huddleston
There's a difference in deciding what products best serve your audience. And if instead you're having to see an increase in caution due to risk aversion, are you. Instead of looking at what might best serve your audience, looking at what is least likely to get you potentially sued?
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Gideon Long
What's your view on the various bans that have been brought in in countries around the world, starting with Australia, on use of social media for under 16s, under 15s for teenagers?
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Jennifer Huddleston
It's very important that we have a holistic conversation around what's going on with youth mental health. It's very easy for people to just point the finger at social media, but this is a really complicated issue. And in fact, for some individuals, social media can be an incredibly valuable lifeline. When we see these calls for bans for under 16s like we've seen in Australia, it raises a few different concerns. The first of which is what does it mean for those individuals for whom this actually is a valuable communication tool, for whom they formed real community? This can include young people who are in very difficult circumstances, including perhaps dealing with abuse or trying to find a community when they otherwise feel isolated in their real world experiences. It can also be an incredible tool for education and creative expression that all go away when you see a flat ban. The second is what do young people do when these bans go into effect? And this is where we've seen some interesting things out of Australia, when one of the things we saw was that many young people initially were downloading these kind of secondary platforms that weren't covered by the quote, unquote social media ban. Things that were in darker corners of the Internet that didn't have the parental controls.
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Gideon Long
So if bans are not the answer, then what is? Because there does seem to be a consensus that something needs to be done. Are there any concrete steps that the social media companies could take, for example, by switching off infinite scrolling or things
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Jennifer Huddleston
like that, every child and every family is going to be unique, but we can really focus on empowering parents and young people themselves to have a positive experience when it comes to using these tools. That includes helping parents know what parental controls are available. Most of the major platforms and most of the major devices offer some form of parental controls for parents who want to turn them on. Additionally, it can be about empowering and educating young people themselves. Are we also explaining, you know, what to do if someone sends you harmful content or if you see content that makes you feel uncomfortable? How to report things.
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Gideon Long
Jennifer Huddleston there I spoke to the BBC's North America Tech correspondent Lily Jamali, who's been following the recent trials. She says there are practical changes the tech companies could make and indeed might be forced to make by the courts, particularly in the wake of the New Mexico case.
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Lily Jamali
These apps are designed to track how you use them, track your patterns of usage, and based on that, they try to personalize what you see, what they serve up to you so that the next time you see a post or a video that, ideally for them anyway, as they're trying to sell advertising, it's something that you want to see and will want to linger to watch. Back in the day, you know, these social media feeds were served up in chronological order. That just doesn't happen anymore. And from the user's perspective, it's what we do see can really feel like a black box. But these algorithmic feeds have been a reality for quite some time now. So that's one area where, you know, I think there's a lot of interest in how social media companies might make changes and other features that were discussed in the trial in Los Angeles. As the plaintiff's lawyer was making his case, he called these platforms addiction machines. He talked about constant notifications that bring you back. So even if you've had the willpower to leave, you're then hit with notifications that beckon you back to the platform.
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Gideon Long
So algorithmic feeds and notifications, is there anything else that companies can do?
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Lily Jamali
In YouTube's case, the autoplay feature got a lot of attention. In this case, that's the feature that makes sure you know there's another video waiting for you as soon as you finish the one you're currently watching. Ending that practice is one option in terms of trying to intervene here. Infinite scroll is another area where I could see there being some intervention. The dopamine hit is really at the heart of all of this stuff. It's a powerful drug, and as one whistleblower in this case described it, it's that promise of something else, something fun or interesting that keeps you coming back. You're seeking that chemical reaction. And the key really is to try to disrupt that cycle. So features like Infinite scroll or Video Autoplay make it so we lose track of time. And I think limiting those features is one way to really intervene. But I have to say, in speaking with parents at this courthouse, for this, people who lost their kids to what they believe was social media addiction. You know, I've heard people talk about how they had to lock their kid's phone in the car to keep it away from them at nighttime, you know, and how sort of the entire parent child and the relationship starts to revolve around, when can I be on the phone? How much more screen time can I have? So it's a very powerful problem that parents especially are dealing with here.
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Gideon Long
As Lily mentioned, one feature that's come in for criticism is infinite scrolling or endless scrolling. That's when you look at a screen and new content is constantly loaded onto it as you scroll down, so you can just go on forever. Platform designers could change that, put a brake on it. Clara Chapaz is France's ambassador for tech and artificial intelligence. She's working closely with President Emmanuel Macron on implementing a French social media ban for under 15s, but also on encouraging companies to make practical changes.
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Clara Chapaz
The European Commission has started an inquiry on TikTok Infinite scroll, saying that this fails to protect minors. As a result of that, TikTok is acting and changing their functionality. So each company needs to go and assess what are the risks that I'm causing to underage kids. I think we've seen companies reacting to inquiries, changing their functionalities, taking it seriously, and that's a good thing. And all the conversations we've been having with companies are actually quite positive. And we are seeing they want to engage and they're taking this issue seriously. It's in everyone's interests.
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Gideon Long
And what are the specific reforms and regulations that you think are needed to bring Big Tech into line?
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Clara Chapaz
Well, I think the first thing is the below 15 ban.
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Jennifer Huddleston
Why?
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Clara Chapaz
Because that gives everyone, families, children themselves, teachers, a simple rule whereby they can say, okay, I know this product is bad for a kid under a certain age. And then, I mean, there's a ton of things that also need to change. I was talking about Infinite scroll, all the rewarding mechanism. There's a lot of those functionalities which are now in the eye of some inquiries from the commission. And if everyone pushes in the same direction, we can make the Internet a safe space. Space for children.
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Gideon Long
With thousands of cases against Big Tech already filed in US courts and at least 30 countries considering bans on social media for teenagers like Australia's, it does seem that change is coming. The pressure is growing. Parents say they are willing to work with tech companies. Lori Shot's 18 year old daughter Annalee, took her own life in 2020, and Lori blames social media for making her daughter feel inadequate about the way she looked. When the verdict came out in Caylee's case, Lori was outside the court and had this message for everyone involved.
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Lily Jamali
Let's fix it. Big Tech us.
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Jennifer Huddleston
Let's make this world a better place.
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Lily Jamali
But parents, we need you to join in with us because it stops today. Big Tech, your gig is over. Yep.
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Gideon Long
And with that, this edition of Business Daily is also over. It was produced by Josh Martin and presented by me, Gideon Long. If you want to hear more episodes on a whole range of topics from the world of money and work, just search for Business Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
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Energy Trust of Oregon Announcer
At Energy Trust of Oregon, we know it isn't easy the tremendous weight of today's operating costs, working in cold, drafty spaces with inefficient heating systems or under lights that have seen brighter days. But we also know how to help you upgrade those systems, lower those costs and meet the demands of your business with smart energy efficient solutions. Find cash incentives@energytrust.org Energy Trust of Oregon More power to you.