[BONUS EPISODE] The Heat is On...Big Tech on Trial: Meta Whistleblower Brian Boland

Summary

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Scrolling 2 Death – [BONUS EPISODE] The Heat is On...Big Tech on Trial: Meta Whistleblower Brian Boland

Overview

This bonus episode of Scrolling 2 Death features an in-depth interview with Brian Boland, a former Meta (Facebook) executive-turned-whistleblower. Boland, who testified in the ongoing "social media addiction" trial just after Mark Zuckerberg, reveals the inner workings of Meta, its prioritization of profit over user safety, and its lack of meaningful accountability. Hosts Nikki Petrossi and Sarah Gardner probe Boland's experiences inside Meta and discuss the broader implications for parents and young people navigating social media.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Testifying Against Meta and Emotional Context

• Boland’s Testimony: Brian describes the immense pressure and emotional stress of testifying against his former employer, especially knowing bereaved parents were in the courtroom. He emphasizes the importance of helping the jury understand complex issues and signals from his time working on advocacy and loss in the community.
  "I think part of what you're trying to do or what I was trying to do is just be helpful to the jury...it felt important, felt stressful." (01:28)
• The Presence of Bereaved Parents: The hosts underline the emotional impact of seeing parents of harmed or deceased children in court, facing company leaders whose decisions they blame for their losses.

2. Profit Over People: Systemic Incentives at Meta

• Market Forces and Accountability: Boland illustrates how shareholder and market pressures direct Meta’s behavior, not user welfare.
  "These companies are chasing what our global economic system and what our markets tell us to prioritize, which is profits and growth and shareholder return." (03:53)
• Congressional & Legal Accountability: He supports legislative and court action as meaningful avenues for forcing tech companies to responsibly address harms, noting the historical effectiveness of litigation in the U.S.
  "If you look historically, we've got a great history in the US of litigation...That kind of opportunity feels like a real opportunity to create that accountability that changes how a company would operate." (06:20)

3. Decision-Making & “Open” Culture at Meta

• Contradiction Between Openness & Control: Boland disputes Zuckerberg’s testimony about openness and diversity of thought, explaining that ultimate power always rested with Zuckerberg. "It has always been a one person show. Everything about the company is oriented around Mark's power and decision making." (08:44)
• Supervoting Stock Structure: Boland discloses how Zuckerberg’s control is structurally unassailable, making him unaccountable to both the board and shareholders. "Mark has the majority of the voting shares. And so there's no accountability there." (08:44)

4. Harm, Research, and Responsibility

• Denial and Failure to Act: Boland outlines how Meta failed to fund or act on meaningful research into user harms, despite being fully able to.
  "If he wanted to get real answers around these questions, he could get them. He could have absolutely avoided testifying in court...by just meaningfully investing and understanding if these products are harmful." (08:44)
• Law of Large Numbers and Safety: Drawing from other expert testimonies, the discussion turns to statistical responsibility – even small harm percentages mean thousands are affected given Meta’s scale.
  "At some point, you really should be responsible for the people on the margins, the people who have the highest chance of getting hurt." (14:18)

5. Advertising, Revenue, and Minors

• Ad Revenue from Minors: Boland concurs that Meta’s stated numbers on ad revenue from minors are misleadingly low, given basic math and outside research.
  "If you know the total revenue...and how many youth are on a platform...You come out to a guesstimate number. That would be pretty solid. It's definitely not in the millions, right?" (17:05)
• Age Estimation Technology: Meta’s age estimation tools are highly effective, but not fully enforced to keep underage users off the platforms. "Your prediction is probably pretty spot on...I saw one leaked document...not wanting to be public about how accurate these prediction algorithms were because then the company might be forced to actually enforce them." (19:02)

6. Product Feature Manipulation & Targeting Teens

• Targeting Vulnerable Moments: Boland acknowledges the plausibility of allegations that Instagram might serve beauty ads to teen girls after they delete a selfie, seeing it as technically possible and revealing a deeper moral issue.
  "Completely doable on the...platform. But surprising, like morally." (20:37)
• Vast Data Collection: Boland describes the depth of user tracking, extending beyond app activity to data from other apps and potentially devices, highlighting privacy concerns. "You can look at every click, every engagement...endless, endless ways that data can be gathered." (22:43)

7. The Power and Impact of Algorithms

• Unintended Outcomes: Boland recounts Meta’s emotional contagion study, which showed that the newsfeed could alter users’ emotions at scale—provoking a pullback in research rather than reforms.
  "This study looked at if we showed people more happy content...could we change how they feel? It showed, like, yeah, like, we can..." (29:25)
• Algorithmic Goals: User engagement, specifically time spent and habit formation, is at the center of product strategy—even when company leaders claim otherwise.
  "Their goal is probably around number of users and engagement and revenue...increasing the time spent is going to get you there." (34:42)
• Addiction & Compulsiveness: Boland contests Meta’s comparisons between social media and binge-watching TV, articulating how platform use is much more compulsive and pervasive.
  "I do think these things are addictive. I think they're compulsive. And I think there are ways you could make them so they're not." (46:55)

8. Whistleblowing and Culture of Denial

• Consequences for Whistleblowers: Boland shares the personal and professional costs, including ostracization, loss of future job prospects in tech, and being dismissed internally for speaking out.
  "You'd be surprised at the amount of back channel that I get from people who are former or still there who are like, 'you're saying what we all believe.'...but...you're putting things on the line...you're risking career paths." (38:46)
• Internal Gaslighting & Culture: Meta’s internal rhetoric rationalizes or minimizes harm and vilifies critics, including other whistleblowers like Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn Williams.
  "There's so much gaslighting that goes on...the mental gymnastics that people will do is pretty strong..." (41:59)

9. The Responsibility of Parents vs. Platforms

• Limits of Parental Control: Boland pushes back on the idea that harm is simply a parental responsibility, emphasizing the overwhelming power and reach of these platforms.
  "That's why the argument that parents should be responsible for all these things is just false to me." (47:42)
• Advice for Parents: Citing Amy Neville, Boland starkly describes the risks:
  "When should your kids get a phone?...when you're ready for your kid to meet a stranger, to see nudity and to watch someone kill themselves is like a good time to let them on these platforms." (47:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Boland on Mark Zuckerberg's power:
  "Everything about the company is oriented around Mark's power and decision making." (08:44)
• On research and responsibility:
  "The scale of money that Meta generates in profits and that Mark has personally...he could have absolutely avoided testifying in court...by just meaningfully investing and understanding if these products are harmful." (08:44)
• On time spent and business incentives:
  "If you really didn't want people spending a lot of time there, you would just tell people, here's the max time we want people to spend..." (34:03)
• On addiction and comparisons to TV:
  "I've never been, like, standing in line, like, 'I need to catch a minute of this Netflix show...'" (46:54)
• On whistleblowing courage:
  "You're saying what we all believe...but you're putting things on the line and you're risking career paths." (38:46)
• On internal denial:
  "There's so much gaslighting that goes on...these are rare occurrences, these are people who are looking to get paid." (41:59)
• Message to Kaylee, the young plaintiff:
  "She's brave...her bravery has mattered a ton...I do know that people are listening. I do know that it's made an impact." (43:40)
• On parent advice:
  "When should your kids get a phone?...when you're ready for your kid to meet a stranger, to see nudity and to watch someone kill themselves..." (47:42)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Testifying and parent presence in court (00:52–03:27)
• Profit vs. people; market incentives (03:27–05:34)
• Litigation as accountability (06:20–07:28)
• Meta’s decision-making structure (08:06–11:30)
• Business incentives and engagement metrics (11:52–14:51)
• Challenges of age estimation and ad revenue from minors (16:55–19:39)
• Advertising manipulation and data collection (20:10–24:12)
• Loss of control & the power of algorithms (24:41–28:59)
• Emotional contagion study & algorithmic change (29:24–31:07)
• Addiction vs. habit and platform incentives (32:43–35:15)
• Attempts to sound the alarm internally, Zuckerberg's response (35:23–36:55)
• Effects on whistleblowers and internal denial (38:46–42:57)
• Parental responsibility and reality (47:42–48:37)
• Final advice to parents & society (48:37–49:18)

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Tone & Language

This episode is earnest and unvarnished, with Boland speaking candidly about both his personal convictions and Meta’s corporate evasions. The conversation is empathetic toward parents and young users but unsparing in its criticism of corporate priorities and the structural lack of accountability inside Meta.

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For Listeners Who Haven't Heard the Episode

This episode provides a rare, firsthand look at how Meta prioritizes profit and user engagement over user well-being, the structural mechanisms ensuring Zuckerberg’s unaccountable control, and the real emotional toll on both affected families and employees struggling with their roles in a system that incentivizes harm. Boland not only breaks down the technical and business details but also issues a call for legislative, legal, and cultural action while recognizing the complexity—and limits—of parental responsibility.

The episode will leave parents more informed—and more wary—about the platforms their children use, and offers validation for whistleblowers and advocates seeking change.

Transcript

[Nikki Petrosi]

Welcome back to the Heat is on. Big tech on trial. I'm Nikki Petrosi.

[Sarah Gardner]

And I'm Sarah Gardner. Today's episode is an important one. We're joined by Brian Bolan, a meta whistleblower who testified in the social media addiction trial just last week, one day after Mark Zuckerberg.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Brian now lives in Bellevue, Washington. He's a husband, a dad of two, and he spent 11 years inside what was then called Facebook from 2009 to 2020. And he primarily worked in the advertising side of the business. This was during the years that Facebook acquired Instagram and catapulted into one of the largest companies in the world.

[Sarah Gardner]

Brian sat in the courtroom for nearly four and a half hours under oath, being questioned by the very company he once helped build. And he did so knowing the professional and the personal risk.

[Nikki Petrosi]

We couldn't be more grateful to bring you our conversation with Brian Boland. Thank you to my co host Sarah Gardner, who was able to join us for the first 15 minutes of the conversation from her family vacation. We appreciate you. So you were in that courtroom being questioned? I logged it. Do you feel like it was almost five hours? Does that sound right?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, felt right.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Felt right. Right. Yeah. How does it feel to be in that seat? A lot of people have, have come through that seat now and I'm just wondering how it feels to be sitting up there for your perspective.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, it's not comfortable. I mean, I imagine some people can get into it, but it's definitely uncomfortable. I think part of what you're trying to do or what I was trying to do is just be helpful to the jury. These are incredibly complicated issues that they're going to get instructions from a judge on. They have to make some understanding about things that I know are being spun certain ways. And so it felt important, felt stressful, less stressful. Once you kind of get into the seat and start answering questions, the lead up to it, you know, it's just days of kind of. And that's where I feel for the folks who are waiting now, just days of kind of like getting ready for it mentally. And it's just nice to start to get in the flow and answer questions. You know, one of the things that I knew, particularly going into the LA case, was that I knew some parents would be in the court probably. And so, you know, as I've done some advocacy work for legislation in Washington state, I've gotten to know some of the parents who've lost kids. And that's the hardest part for me. Right. Is knowing their Loss. And so, like, geared up to know that they'd be there and, you know, felt good that I could answer questions that that would bring light to what happened.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right. And, you know, we've been with those parents for a few weeks now. I mean, spending time with them over the past few years. But just in LA around the trial, it's just been so insane to see them sitting there, like, directly in front of them is Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Mosseri. Like, they could reach out and touch the. The man that made choices, that if he made different choices, their kids could still be alive today. And that is so hard to process and so emotional for them.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. You know, and I think it's one thing to make choices that cause harm and do so unknowingly like that happens in the world. I think it's when you start to have more and more concerning signals and evidence that there are problems that it is just incomprehensible to me that you wouldn't make sure you wouldn't check.

[Nikki Petrosi]

You and your wife have an organization called the Delta Fund, and I read in your mission that it says the prevailing economic system is built to prioritize profit over people, to concentrate wealth and to treat human communities as resources to be extracted. And I thought, boy, does that feel relevant to these companies that are on trial right now. Can you speak to the prioritization of profit over people in regard to Meta?

[Brian Boland]

These companies are chasing what our global economic system and what our markets tell us to prioritize, which is profits and growth and shareholder return. Like, if you look at, there's a really interesting period of time when Francis Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, came out and had all these revelations that covered everything from youth harms on Instagram to cartel recruitment and murders in Mexico, to human trafficking on the platform and known to be on the platform platform in the Middle East. Then she testified before Congress. And when all this came out, the stock took a drop. I think it was like a $5 billion drop for a week or two, and then it recovered. Then in the following January, there was an earnings where the earnings from Meta, the cost side of things, was higher than the market wanted. And so it really hammered the stock down. And the stock went down, down, down, down, until Mark Zuckerberg said, hey, we're going to get more efficient. We're going to lay off a bunch of people. And the market was like, yay. And the stock went all the way back up into the heights. I think it's probably the highest that it's been recently. And so you see the market signaling, hey, these issues around harms and people suffering from this platform are not going to be a concern. It's when costs are too high that it's a concern. That reinforcing just tells the company to chase profits. With something like Facebook, it's one of the most powerful companies in the world, and there's always competition to be the most powerful company in the world. Those are the things that drive the competition. And the drive inside the company wasn't always that way.

[Sarah Gardner]

I was working with the Facebook teams when the consolidation of a lot of the trust and safety teams happened around because I worked at an organization that was working alongside Meta and I remember when they cut like the child safety team and like reposition them under like, not spam, but it was like some. And everyone was just so, like frustrated because it was like, no, this team needs more money. I just wanted to go to that last point that you made, because the shareholders, everybody's still making money. So from their perspective, there's no problem. We're making money. Was that part of your decision to join the trials? Because you think this is something that could actually affect Meta and make them make changes and. Or what else do you think could actually force Mark's hand?

[Brian Boland]

The various efforts I've taken along the way have been about creating avenues for accountability. You know, and when I testified before the US Senate, it was because there was a piece of legislation called PATA Platform Accountability and Transparency act that I felt would have been a good first step towards bringing some accountability to the platforms. The trial is similar. I still am a believer in the rule of law. It's an exciting time in our nation around rule of law, but I'm still a believer in the rule of law and the power of courts. If you look historically, we've got a great history in the US of litigation and courts changing the behavior of companies by holding them accountable for the products that they build. That kind of opportunity feels like a real opportunity to create that accountability that changes how a company would operate. You know, the more judgments that a company has against it that are billion dollar judgments or large judgments that open new avenues for lawsuits, suddenly makes a company more inclined to take the actions to prevent future lawsuits. And so that, I think is a real accountability lever that could come out of these trials.

[Nikki Petrosi]

When Mark Zuckerberg walks through those courtroom doors, he loses his power. Like he doesn't have any more power than Kaylee does behind those courtroom doors. And that's where we need to be having these Conversations and allowing a jury to decide based off of equal evidence, hopefully with no other influence affecting them.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, that's right. I think you've got the avenues of changing legislation like section 230 has too much protection in my view. I get in some online arguments about that every so often. The second avenue, you're right, is the jury. A jury can weigh the information and can look at the outcomes here and make a decision.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Let's get into Mark Zuckerberg's testimony, which you didn't see. It was the day before you and Mark Zuckerberg said a lot of things, he repeated a lot of things. I could tell he practiced them. One of the things that he talked about was the unusually open corporate culture at Meta, that for him diversity of ideas is important, that he believes they make better decisions and build better things because they have different views. And that was different from the vibe of your statement, which is like Mark decides what happens at the company. Can you explain that discrepancy?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. And there's kind of been a period of time where the company's changed quite a bit. When I first started there, the idea that everyone should be able to learn what's happening at the company and learn from each other and read each other's projects and have a very open culture of ideas was extremely strong. And since the whistleblowers and things got harder, they've locked that down and they've made it so that people, people can't see other groups groups and can't see other teams documents. That became something that was really locked down. But even from the earliest days when it was open and people could talk about things and bring ideas, Mark was the one who made the decisions. It has always been a one person show. Everything about the company is oriented around Mark's power and decision making. It has a very non traditional stock structure. So, you know, with advice from Marc Andreessen and some other people, they created a kind of share structure that allows Mark to have super voting shares so that even though he sells down shares and like puts it into his foundation or whatever he uses the money for, he retains the voting control of the company no matter what happens. And so you've got this structure where it's literally unaccountable, it's not accountable to shareholders. People say shareholders hold companies accountable, but Mark has the majority of the voting shares. And so there's no accountability there. And that creates the structure that Mark decides everything from who's on the board to what the board says. The board can't fire them. Most Times boards can fire CEOs of companies, they can't. And so the decisions of the board, the decisions of the company, the product strategy, the investments that get made, it's just Mark. The scale of money that we're talking about that Meta generates in profits and that Mark has personally. If he wanted to get real answers around these questions, he could get them. He could have absolutely avoided testifying in court and doing these uncomfortable trials by just meaningfully investing and understanding if these products are harmful or not. And then it wouldn't be an argument. Right. We could say, look, there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that says X, Y or Z. But that was not the choice. And that doesn't seem to be an interest that he has. And I don't know if that's a psychological hang up in that he'd have to question whether he's actually creating harm in the world or not. But even that, to me, like I would want to know. I mean, the way that I ran my career at the company was that anytime we were working on something, if we had concerns or questions or thought that it wasn't going well, we made sure that we knew. And like in our group, that's what we did. We found the hardest, hardest issues and hardest questions and found them first and tried to figure out what the truth was first.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right. That's what reasonable people would do.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. I mean, like, if you're. There is this, this superpower that Mark has to seem to like ignore the realities and truth of the world and try to make it what he wants it to be and believe it to be. It was probably helpful in founding a company that did what it did, but it is not helpful when there are things that are concerning that he just ignores.

[Nikki Petrosi]

It's like a God complex.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. I think power is in there for sure. Competition. Most competitive person I've ever met. Um, is Mark like super competitive? Um, and that competition spans to competitive with Apple and with Google and other companies that, that he sees as, as super competitive to him.

[Nikki Petrosi]

You know, one of Mark's other big lines was we want to build something valuable. Like if you build value, people will want to spend time there and that he talked about their North Star making, just making sure they're delivering value. And also like, we want people to have a positive experience because if our products aren't safe, people will leave. Like, do you agree?

[Brian Boland]

I mean, there's a mix in there, right? So like value, you do want to have something that people want to use. Now I think one thing that happens is People talk themselves into their own marketing slogans. And the things that sound good, like, they sound good to you because you want to believe it too. And like, you're invested in believing it. And I think Mark's very invested in believing those statements. You know, the idea that if a product was harmful, they wouldn't use it. There are just so many counterexamples of products in the world that people use even though they're harmful. We don't even need to go all the way to, like, heroin and other things that are like, the extreme examples. But the notion that people would stop using them if they're harmful is harder when the harms are not. You use Meta's products and your hand burns.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right?

[Brian Boland]

Right. Like, if you were using Meta's product and as you used it, you got a burn on your hand, you probably stop using the product because it's like very immediate feedback. The way that the harms manifest is not something that feels as obvious. That makes it harder to research, but that also makes it harder for people to take their own steps and say, like, yeah, this is bad for me, but they do. You know, I've talked to tons of kids who have deleted their social media because they're like, I just realized this is stupid and a waste of my time.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Kaylee talks about in this trial wanting to get off, but she can't. She. She even wants to get a job in social, managing social media. Now it's like she's so tied in.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, they're super powerful. And like, another thing that people get caught up in is averages. Right. Like, most people don't have a problem with these, these platforms. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. We don't have research to tell. But even if you took that and accepted that most people had a fine experience, what's the acceptable percentage of people who get significantly harmed or die because of it?

[Nikki Petrosi]

When we're talking about billions?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, when you talk about the percentages of huge numbers, it adds up to staggering numbers really, really quickly. And so at some point, you really should be responsible for the people on the margins, the people who have the highest chance of getting hurt. And that doesn't mean nobody gets hurt. I mean, I think that's the thing that they tried to also say is like, well, we can't prevent all the harm. No one's asking them prevent all the harm. We're just asking them to prevent the reasonably expected amount of harm that these create.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right. When I interviewed Arturo Behar, who's going to testify, he talked about the law of large numbers. And if there was one or two instances that they come across of a safety issue to a child, they can assume and extrapolate that there are thousands or tens of thousands or even millions of children experiencing that same thing. And it's their responsibility, ability to track that down and make sure that's not happening and if it is, to fix it 100%.

[Brian Boland]

And Arturo is a great example of just like scratching the surface of what you could do if you actually funded the work. Imagine if you funded 100, 500,000 Arturos and you gave them a really strong mandate to be able to be curious and to research and to develop understanding. And you did some agreements with universities to partner on the studies and really understood what was happening instead of this like hand wavy, maybe it is, maybe it isn't problem.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right.

[Brian Boland]

We'd really, really know and really be able to take active steps to fix it.

[Nikki Petrosi]

And then your platform would actually be safe and parents everywhere would feel comfortable with our kids on there and not be fighting you every step of the way.

[Brian Boland]

100%.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Dr. John Chandler testified he just finished a couple of days ago. He's like a data science expert and he was given access to millions of internal documents from Meta and YouTube and he was tasked with assessing the advertising data related to minors. And he found holes specifically, he said there were significant errors and contradictions and he found the ad revenue data from Meta to be unreliable. He thought that the Refool article, which I can share with you after and I'll put in the episode notes, was more accurate, showing numbers around $5 billion a year from minors. That. That's from 2022. That for him was more accurate, maybe slightly higher given their assessment. They didn't have the internal documents, but he thought the real number is closer to that number than it was what he saw, which was more in the mill. I mean, million, like low millions, I have to check.

[Brian Boland]

But yeah, I mean, I think like a basic, you know, like a basic math problem, you could kind of get to some pretty good guesses at what the number is. Right. If you.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Yep.

[Brian Boland]

If you know the total revenue, which I think is well over 100 billion a year now. Right. You take that, figure out roughly as a population, how many youth are on a platform, you know, that they're more active than not. They may be more valuable advertising targets in some ways and less valuable in others.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right.

[Brian Boland]

You come out to a guesstimate number. That would be pretty solid. It's definitely not in the millions, right?

[Nikki Petrosi]

Totally. And we did get to see his equation, Dr. Chandler's equation that he used to estimate the ad revenue. And, you know, Meta came back with, you know, there's a lot of ways to use Instagram that you're not seeing ads. Right. Within messaging. When you do an Instagram live. What about when you're making phone calls on Instagram? Sure. So they were saying the total time spent isn't a hard number because there's ways that people use Instagram where they're not seeing ads.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. It'd be really cool if we could just look at the data and study it, wouldn't it?

[Nikki Petrosi]

I want to talk about the age estimation technology. You said that metas Facebook at the time, their tech around age estimation was the best in the industry. We know that this tech is used to target relevant ads to users. Can you give us an idea of how accurate is the technology? Like if a child puts in a fake birthday and you want to know their real age in order to serve them the right ads, how close can you get?

[Brian Boland]

Estimating age was something that had the company had been doing since the earliest days that I was there. Right. Because you do have people who are stating their age on Facebook and then you want to understand what's accurate and what's not. And so the teams had built out models and it, you know, it's, you know, you can kind of watch what people do, you kind of see who they engage with, how they engage. You can get pretty, pretty spot on to the age of people. And I think I saw some leaked documents in one of the. It's amazing how many documents have leaked over time.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Oh, yeah.

[Brian Boland]

But I saw one leaked document that was talking about, you know, not wanting to be public about how accurate these prediction algorithms were because then the company might be forced to actually enforce them. It's been going on for well over a decade. So, you know, your ability gets better and better and your data gets better and better. Your prediction is probably pretty spot on.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Pretty spot on. Okay. Because that's where my next question is going is Meta says they are also using this age estimation technology to find kids under 13 and kick them off. Do you have insight onto whether or not this is prioritized? Like, is the tech that the ad teams are using given equal weight to the safety side?

[Brian Boland]

Unless things have changed since I've left, teams could just borrow and use any sort of technology at the company. It's one of the things about it being open was that if there were things that were usable and useful and interesting tech inside some part of the company, you could just borrow it and use it in another part of the company. And so it's very open from that standpoint of data, data infrastructures and even algorithms like that. So no reason that they couldn't use it.

[Nikki Petrosi]

A question about advertising because we have this example from Sarah Wynn Williams, who's a meta whistleblower and wrote a book called Careless People. Did you read that book?

[Brian Boland]

How could you not?

[Nikki Petrosi]

I know. How could you put it, not put it down? I, I read it in eight and a half hours straight.

[Brian Boland]

That's a good. She's a great writer.

[Nikki Petrosi]

She's a great writer. So. But one thing that really stood out to me was her allegation that Instagram was tracking when a teenager would delete a selfie, a teenage girl would delete a selfie and then serving them a beauty ad in that moment. Was that possible? And do you, do you feel like that could have been happening?

[Brian Boland]

Definitely think it's possible. And I surprised to read it in the book, but not because I was like, oh, I didn't think this. I didn't like, I don't see how someone could do this. More surprised that people would. You know, I think you talk about the power of these tools. You gave teams a lot of control and power over what they could do with advertisers and advertising. And so, you know, the ability for a team who is working with advertisers to say, hey, we can do a data science project. We can actually have access to some of the data and build some of these ways to reach people and then, and then market them to get more advertising dollars into the platform. Completely doable on the, on the product

[Nikki Petrosi]

and platform, but surprising, like morally.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. I mean, again, the number of ways that people have let me down in their choices around different parts of this business is, is just endless. And that's one of them, right, Is that you could see somebody in an ad sales group or, you know, an ad sales role saying, my customers would love to be able to reach people who are feeling sad about their appearance. Do we have ways to do that? And somebody says, oh, it's interesting data science exercise. And they kind of build a model that can create a targeting group based on that and then you sell it to them. Probably what happened? I don't know for sure. There's so much. All these platforms, not meta specific, all these platforms have so much data and information, just like an unimaginable amount of information. And it's not just having the information, it's having the technology and the capabilities to be able to analyze that information. And remember, that was five years ago, before we had our machine learning. AI covers. It's like a marketing term that covers too many things. But all the technology that's advanced over the last five years to handle massive data sets and make judgments off of those data sets, the technology is infinitely more powerful than when I left.

[Nikki Petrosi]

And that's what I want to talk about next. You said in your testimony, everything you do on Instagram is being watched. And that was like, what? That's really scary. I mean, in the. In the example by Sarah Wynn Williams was like, wait, so they know if you've taken a selfie on your camera roll, that's not Instagram. Can you explain what you mean by that? Like, everything you do is being watched?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. When you think about installing an app or even on your computer, when you load a website, you think that it just has access to just the app itself or just what's on your screen. Even in that environment, just with the app being there or what you see on your screen, you can gather a lot of information. You can understand when somebody pauses. Why did they spend seven seconds on something instead of two seconds when they usually go by? Why do they. But they stopped. They paused. Something caught their attention. You can look at every click, every engagement, every share, every comment, everything that they do. And then depending on the permissions, and this is where apps differ on the permissions that they have. You accept, because when you install the app, you know that long thing that you agree to that you read every single word of saying, like, it's fine for you to do all these things. Everyone just clicks through and agrees. And sometimes that may look at things on your device and data from your device and then incorporate that into what the company understands. You can look at the fact that there are measurement tools that allow the gathering of data in other apps. So you may not even be using a meta app. You may be using a game that you like to play. And that game, because it is an advertiser, sends data back to meta and that now fills out your profile even more. And so endless, endless ways that data can be gathered. And that can be used for great reasons. Right. You can get experiences that are really relevant and interesting to you, and then it can be used in ways that are harmful if it's not managed correctly.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Is it tracking also activity on other devices that may be connected to your Apple ID or on your WI FI network? Is it also expanding out past your

[Brian Boland]

device five years ago? I don't think so. But now it's been a long time.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Okay, okay. I heard that about TikTok, so I was. But I haven't heard that about Meta yet. And that was concerning.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, I mean, I think they're, I think they're all doing very similar things. I think if somebody can do it, somebody else is going to copy it. Right. You got to remember, engineers move between companies and bring their, their really interesting ideas with them.

[Nikki Petrosi]

People might be like, okay, well I like the ads I'm served, they're targeted to me. I stuff I want or stuff that I need. But are we even in control of what we want anymore? Like, are we even consciously making those decisions? Or are our very thoughts being controlled, our very thoughts and opinions and likes and dislikes being controlled by the algorithms at this point?

[Brian Boland]

It's a very deep philosophical question.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Yeah, I'm just, what's your opinion?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, look, I mean, I think we know that people are influenced by what they see and what they read, what they hear. And that's been true for as long as people have had things that they can read, see or hear. I mean, that's true from the very first story that people told. I mean, think about the stories that shaped like the story that people believe about America and American exceptionalism. That's a story, that's something that has shaped people's opinions and attitudes and beliefs.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Yeah.

[Brian Boland]

And take that fact that we know that what you see here and are presented with changes your mind and changes your attitude. You know that that's happening now with a system that is actually trying to think about how to do something that is not just self serving and pushing one story that's just self serving and trying to get you to buy more products or to spend more time. And so it's that reinforcement that happens in subtle small ways over and over again that compound. And so, you know, do I believe that we've lost free will? No. Do I believe that there is a bigger impact on each of us from these products? 100%. And that was, you know, my concern when I left was that attitudes, behaviors, opinions of people were being dramatically shifted in harmful ways by these incredibly powerful tools.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Even the people working closest to the algorithms don't fully understand them. And that made me think like, how much control does Meta actually have? You gave the analogy to testing cars. Like if you don't crash it, you don't really know what's going to happen, so you have to crash it. Like, are our kids crash dummies in this situation? Like, is Meta testing the algorithms and features on Our kids without really knowing how it's going to affect them.

[Brian Boland]

I mean, I think it's worse because I think the thing with the crash test dummies is that you are doing it so that you can learn what doesn't work so you can fix it. Like, I think this is just like throwing some cars out there and then yeah, some of them blow up. Yeah, there's some dead bodies, but you're selling more cars. And so like people wouldn't buy a car if it wasn't safe, even though people keep dying in the car. You know, I think it's just more, more situation of just recklessness and negligence on not trying to study and not trying to have the crash tests and crash test dummies. People have been on one of these products for 10 years and you're on it for a couple hours a day. So just think about one day of interactions on a product. How many stories you might see, how did you interact with them, how did you pause on them, how did you click on them? What did you like? Would you comment? Would you share? Think about how much data gathered from that one day over a couple hours on the product. Now take that by 365 times. Take that by 10 years time. Now build a system that can say, hey, we want to use everything we know about somebody. Because the technology is so advanced now that you could look at massive amounts of data around somebody to try to make decisions around what they would really engage with. Again, they don't talk about goaling for time spent, they talk about engaging. But the more you engage, the more time you spend. If a system can look at all that data and then you use technology to start to look at associations in that data that people would never imagine. You may have paused on one story that is about kayaking. It turns out that there's an association between kayaking and bread baking that people wouldn't normally think about. But because all this data is in there, the algorithm can start to find these spots and connections and then deliver things in ways that nobody could understand. And because there's so many things that the systems can look at, engineers understand generally how they work, but they really need to run them and see what comes out of them to understand what the change made. And it's quite often that changes are made with an expected outcome. And then you're like, oh my gosh, look at that. This did something totally different than we expected.

[Nikki Petrosi]

And it has to be run against millions of people in order to get the output so they can learn from it.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, Generally when you're testing something, you run testing control groups that are in the millions or hundreds of thousands of people. There's this really interesting study that kind of created some bad outcomes in the company that was around 20. Gosh, I want to guess 2011 maybe might be what I'm thinking. That was around, I think it was called, was an emotional contagion, I think is what it was called.

[Nikki Petrosi]

But internal study.

[Brian Boland]

No, it was like published externally. So this was like in. The public reacted to this study in ways that I think put a chill on research in some ways that were sad because this study looked at. If we showed people more happy content in their feed or more sad content, could we change how they feel? It showed, like, yeah, like, we can make. We can change how people feel. We can make the emotional contagion contagious. And it blew up because it was a research study that was conducted on hundreds of thousands of people. And so societally, people freaked out and lost their mind, which is probably the right thing to say. Hey, we need to have good controls over how we do these studies. The flip side was that in 2011, we had really interesting indications on how these algorithms could change what people think and feel. And instead of pursuing that line of research, the feedback was, you better not be testing on people. And so there was a huge pullback on research. Was the algorithm designed to make it so that angry, sensational anger content was what people were engaging with? No, the algorithm was just told, hey, change this number, make this metric go up. The algorithm didn't even think about. It was like, hey, this stuff that makes people angry, look at them, they're like super engaged and commenting. This is great. And then you had all these companies, these external companies contacting us saying, hey, look, I think you're building a rage machine, rewarding content that is. That is angrier, more vitriolic.

[Nikki Petrosi]

What did you say? Like the algorithm can't think, can't feel, doesn't care.

[Brian Boland]

Something doesn't care, doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, just does. Just chases the goal.

[Nikki Petrosi]

One more question about control because Kayleigh just in the courtroom, like 20 minutes ago, said, I feel like social media controls me instead of me controlling it. Do you have comment on that? Like, is that control intentional?

[Brian Boland]

It's intentional in that the companies look at engagement and usage. It's not like the number that they track is not yearly active users and says, like, as long as people are active once a year, we're happy. They look at monthly active users and daily active users and track the Number of people who use the product daily. And so if your goal is daily active users, then you really care about people using it daily. And so you may not, in your mind, think about it as, hey, we're controlling somebody by getting them to engage. You think you're just getting the daily active user, but what you're doing is you're pinging a notification and you're learning how somebody responds to notifications so that when their phone dings and everyone like, we all have it now, where you have the buzz and you're like, ooh, let me see what's going on. And then you look at the notification that leads you into the product, Then the product leads you into staying in a little bit longer. Is it a loss of control? Yeah, in some ways. Is it like a maniacal control? You people tell themselves it's not?

[Nikki Petrosi]

I mean, some of the slides talk about the internal slides talk about habit building and habit forming and studying how to build habits and then building functionality to create habits to get them back every day. And then the algorithm works to keep them on and the other functionality.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. And it's not like, you know, building habits and a healthy lifestyle app is probably good, like something that's about exercise and mindfulness and whatnot.

[Nikki Petrosi]

But this isn't that a little bit more about ads? We know that's the primary way that Instagram makes money. The more time users spend on Instagram, the more ads, the more money they make. That's true. No matter what the age of the user. We know Kayleigh spent 16 hours on Instagram in one day. And that brings into question, is meta truly incentivized in any way to limit time that youth spend on there when they make almost all of their money from increasing time spent?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. I mean, look, the strongest entire argument for the we don't go on time spent and time that's not that important is that Mark could just set a goal of reducing time spent.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Sure. Where's that? I didn't see that. I didn't see that in the documents.

[Brian Boland]

All you'd have to do is say, like, hey, look, you know, we would like to have kids. Like, people spend like 30, 45 minutes a day. Like, how do we. How do we get people the stuff that matters most to them in the shortest amount of time possible? And let's see what we can do to kick people off after 45 minutes. I mean, look, like Instagram used to have a. You're all caught up in the feed

[Nikki Petrosi]

and you put it down. Right.

[Brian Boland]

And they got rid of it. Right. So why'd they get rid of it? Right.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Because too many people were put, were

[Brian Boland]

putting it down, make more money if that's not there. And so, you know, I think the, I think it's, to me, it's just like, it's such a ridiculous argument of like, if you really didn't want people spending a lot of time there, you would just tell people, here's the max time we want people to spend.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Some of Those internal documents, one from 2022 showed milestones. And it was 20, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26. And every year increasing time spent by 2 minutes, 40, 40 minutes, 42 minutes, 44, 46. And then mark was arguing that that's a milestone, not a goal. And there was this big back and forth about milestone versus goal. We have to track somehow our value add. And so, I mean, any, any comment on that?

[Brian Boland]

I guarantee that those milestones are going to show up in someone's performance review.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Adam Mosseri's self performance review was also brought up where he said that I am tracking on time. Time spent.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. So I mean, that's all you need to know. Like that that is how people are promoted. They're compensated, their stock rewards, everything is tied up into that. So, you know, your goal is probably around number of users and engagement and revenue. And then you decompose those goals into things that get you there and increasing the time spent is going to get you there. Yeah. And so like, you know, there's a lot of, oh, we don't officially go on time spent stuff, but that's, that's, that's just a talking point. And you look at the drivers of that, the things that would lead to more time spent, that's what everyone's gold on. So.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right.

[Brian Boland]

It's a, it's a disingenuous argument at best.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Right before you left the company, you shared your concerns with executives, including Mark Zuckerberg. You told them that you believe the algorithms were creating harmful outcomes in the world, that the company should increase research to understand the harms and increase transparency. Did you get a response to that communication?

[Brian Boland]

I did, yeah.

[Nikki Petrosi]

What was that response?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, he just said like, I hope there are things you're still proud of.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Zuckerberg said that?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Nikki Petrosi]

So didn't acknowledge the concern?

[Brian Boland]

No, I was trying to get other people to agree to fund all this work. And ultimately if Mark said this is important, we would have done it. And I would have stayed. I would have stayed even though I was really concerned that the product was doing Very harmful things. I would have stayed if we could have built those things.

[Nikki Petrosi]

You could have made a great difference in millions of people's lives, including minors, if you had been able to or if Mark cared enough to implement these safety resources.

[Brian Boland]

I think the naivete I had even when I left was that Mark Zuckerberg would have cared. I mean, look, I think Arturo stuff is pretty compelling, right? Look, I worked with Arturo early on when I was there. We were doing an acquisition and he was tasked with evaluating it because he was considered an extremely good engineer. And so he's somebody who is well respected and very good at what he does. And so when he's bringing these concerns forward, I think the lack of engagement or care on them just shows that the company won't actually take steps and doesn't actually care.

[Nikki Petrosi]

And I want to say here, like, still doesn't care because Arturo continues to safety test their current version of Instagram teens and finds that like 40 out of 46 or something of their safety features within Instagram teens either don't work or have been removed. And so Arturo being the best of the best, testing these features and finding they're not working.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, but the TV commercials are good.

[Nikki Petrosi]

But the TV commercials are great. The partnerships with. Who did, who did they do on Tom Brady recently? Oh, man, we care.

[Brian Boland]

We care.

[Nikki Petrosi]

We totally care. But show us. It's like their update this week. Did you see the update around? If your child searches for suicide or self harm content an unknown number of times in an unknown amount of time, we will alert you.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, it's performative. You know, I think like in its, in its. This is the thing that I hate the most is like, I'm not calling for the end of these products and platforms because I do think that they could be built and designed to be really additive to our lives and they're not today. And so, you know, to me it's a, it's the lost opportunity and the tragedy of what could really be something that meets the mission of the company if they actually cared. They don't care about the mission, but if they did, you could have something that helps communities build and help bring people closer together and you could design towards that in a less powerful, less profitable company that would actually have world changing impacts, but they don't care. And so that's the loss that we have today.

[Nikki Petrosi]

I noticed in your testimony you said I chose to leave and they tried to keep me from leaving. Did I hear that part right?

[Brian Boland]

Yeah.

[Nikki Petrosi]

So there are so few whistleblowers, although that Number is growing. But the stakes are really high for people in your position. And I wonder if you could just elaborate a bit on that for people who are there right now, now and listening and maybe want to leave but don't know how and. And then what would you tell them?

[Brian Boland]

I guess you'd be surprised at the amount of back channel that I get from people who are former or still there who are like, you're saying what we all believe. Like, you're saying what we all would love to say. I'm like, come say it with me.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Oh, my God, that makes me so sad.

[Brian Boland]

I get it. I get it. Because it's. It's hard. And you're putting things on the line and you are, you know, risking career paths and career choices of. And these are things I don't want. I don't want to work in advertising again. I don't want to work in building these kinds of technologies again. You know, there are venture firms who I would never take a dime from because I think they are just bad actors in the world. So, like, a lot of the relationships that I've burned or partners that I think I've burned, I'm kind of okay with because I think they're kind of bad for the world. But, like, that is a tax that people would pay, is that there are. Is that outcome. And then. And they went after Sarawin Williams pretty hard. We'll see how that plays out. But my gut is that she's probably not making things up in her book. There's enough in there in descriptions of people that I knew that I was like, yeah, she nailed that. So the idea that she got these other things wrong would really surprise me. And so I think people get worried about that. But I think here's the reality is that the company doesn't care about you. Like, there was this kind of meme early on of, like, the Facebook family. And, like, Facebook's a family. And I remember a round of layoffs when the first huge drown came along where a bunch of people in these groups were saying, like, you know, I got laid off, but I'll always be a part of the family. And like, that is not. It is not a family. It just fired you. Like, you were inefficient, so you got cut. And families don't do that. And so there's like this deprogramming. People need to do, like, getting in other things. And, you know, so I think the best time to find a job is when you want to find a job rather than when you need to find a job. So if you're feeling uncomfortable, start looking. Start spending a carve out amount of your day looking for companies that you'd feel proud to work at and then, you know, for other people speaking up. I think at the end of the day, the truth is on your side. If you're making things up right, like, if your agenda is to like fabricate stuff, that's going to be a problem. If you're just sharing the truth of your experience and the truth of what you saw and what you believed, it's uncomfortable. But it's okay to be critical of this company and these companies that could go a different path and are choosing not to.

[Nikki Petrosi]

We did a direct action last week at Snapchat headquarters in Santa Monica and we went into the street in front of their building and painted the names of 108 kids that had passed away to Fentanyl. A lot of them, Fentanyl that had been promoted to them through a drug dealer on Snapchat. And I was looking up and seeing some Snapchat employees look down and I made sure I held that sign straight towards them. And I just like wonder what goes through their mind. For people that work at these companies and see the headlines and see things going on that are bad within their company, do they, do they not believe it? Do they think it's a one, you know, one off circumstance? Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Brian Boland]

There's so much gaslighting that goes on. There's so much internal narrative of like, you know, these are rare occurrences, these are people who are looking to get paid. When Frances Haugen came out and she had all these disclosures and testified before Congress, there was apparently a number of vice presidents inside meta who were discussing the fact that, that she was probably a paid plant, that a different company had infiltrated her into Facebook so she could try to find documents that might look incriminating and then leak them. And the person who was telling me this believed it fully, was like, yeah, you know, I mean, we think she was a paid plant. Which I was like, that is mind blowing like that. She's not a paid plant. And so I think, I think the narratives internally and the mental gymnastics that people will do is, is pretty strong to say that this is fringe, not real, not the core thing. But look at all the good that we do, all the things that you tell yourself to keep going.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Well, it's not fringe when you have over 3000 families filing this lawsuit against these four social media companies, 1500 more on the federal level and literally this week, three dozen more families joining the lawsuit. Every week there's more families joining the lawsuit for addiction and harm to their children. That's not a fringe situation because that's representative of a much larger number. And so Kaylee somehow randomly gets to lead off this group of people changing the world and sort of representing all of us. And she testified yesterday and today being Friday. I just wonder if there's anything that you want to say to Kaylee or would want her to know because she may, she may listen to this.

[Brian Boland]

I don't know her. I've never seen her. Don't. Don't know anything. Knows some of the high level about her case, but man, she's brave. She's brave. You know, you think about somebody like, who's what, she's 20 years old.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Yep.

[Brian Boland]

I mean, 20 years old who's brave enough to stand up in a high profile case against an incredibly well funded army of companies and their lawyers and to fight for what she believes to be true. I don't know how this case works out. I don't know how the jury decides, but I do know that people are listening. I do know that it's made an impact. I do know that her bravery has mattered a ton. And so I think, you know, I'd love for other people to feel inspired by her. Not because of the harm she's gone through, but because the way that she's redeeming it and standing up and saying, look, we need to fight for the future that we all want to have here. And so I think it's incredibly inspiring. I think it's incredibly brave. And I'm just impressed with what she's done.

[Nikki Petrosi]

She is so brave. And just to imagine like what you went through, just the waiting and the sitting and the questions and the, you know, I'm not picking on you, but. And then a dig and a dig and like, she was funny. Yeah. So you found that. I was talking about Cynthia Jones of Meta. She loves that. Not picking on you. But then she goes for it.

[Brian Boland]

She was funny. She didn't leave. I was like, I know, I know. Crazy, right?

[Nikki Petrosi]

She didn't leave. Crazy because she's addicted to it. You're making my point. I was wondering if you have two kids, if anything, about their experience, without sharing anything personal, kind of affected how you feel about the safety of these products or the benefit of these products. Anything you want to share on that.

[Brian Boland]

They have largely walked away from these products and like heavily moderate their engagement with them. That was not something that we did that was something they came to their own kind of conclusions around. And so it's telling, you know, and, like, you know, you hear about being in college and you go to the dining hall and when I went to college, we hung out, we talked, and we were eating dinner. We were, like, throwing food at each other, just having fun, like, building relationships. And, yeah, they go to the dining hall and everyone's just, like, staring down at their device on their TikTok or their Instagram and, like, how much, you know, my kids have represented to me that that sucked. Like, that was not the experience they wanted of building relationship.

[Nikki Petrosi]

Yeah.

[Brian Boland]

And so, you know, I think it's. I think it's. I think a generation is starting to see that, and I think it's going to start to take control of this

[Nikki Petrosi]

last question, this being the crux of the case. And I know you're not a mental health professional, but in your opinion, do you feel that social media is addictive to young people?

[Brian Boland]

You think about the fact that people feel compelled to, first thing in the morning, check their phone, and they feel the buzz, and they pull out their phone and they have time to kill, and they pull out their phone and they're going to Instagram or they're going to TikTok. Every single time. And every free moment and spare second of the day is spent checking back in, checking back in, checking back in. That feels more compulsive, more addictive. Then, you know, I read Adam Mosseri's Like I'm Addicted to a Netflix show is the most insane comparison, because I've never been, like, I'm standing in line, like, I need to catch a minute of this Netflix show so I can go to my next minute later. Like, it doesn't work that way.

[Nikki Petrosi]

No.

[Brian Boland]

And so I do think these things are addictive. I think they're compulsive. And I think there are ways you could make them so they're not.

[Nikki Petrosi]

It just feels so obvious. That's why it's crazy that we're here in this trial with them trying to prove it's not when their internal documents say it is. And they studied addiction and building these functions, and everybody just knows. Everybody just knows it's addictive.

[Brian Boland]

Yeah, but look, they've been able to live off of bad law for a long time. You know, the way that Section 230 was constructed was very good for the growth of the Internet, but it created problems for holding accountable for bad products until now. And we'll see if the law is flexible enough to say, yeah, it's not about the content. If you're building things that are harmful, that's what matters.

[Nikki Petrosi]

I just wonder if there's anything else that you didn't share in your testimony or today that you wanted to get out there.

[Brian Boland]

I think a lot of people, the tragedy when you talk to parents is that you just don't know how harmful a lot of these things are. Amy Neville had a great answer to the when should your kids get a phone? Or when can they be on social media? And it was, you know, when you're, when you're ready for your kid to meet a stranger, to see nudity and to watch someone kill themselves is like a good time to let them on these platforms cuts through in a different way than like, oh, when they're 14 and you should have it monitored and check their DMs. Like, it's a very different conversation. And I think, you know, for most parents, they're busy. It's very hard to manage these things. That's why the argument that parents should be responsible for all these things is just false to me. But I think just for parents to know that, like, a lot more is going on than even you realize and figuring out how to really have the conversations to keep your kids safe and to limit their access, I think is probably important.

[Nikki Petrosi]

And a lot of it is out of our control. And there are things that are in our control. I get that comment all the time. But the parents have responsibility, right? And I'm like, Kaylee's not saying. And Kaylee and her family are not saying they have no responsibility. They're saying that social media played a substantial role in addition to the family environment in her mental health harms. And that's. We're just trying to share the load from companies that push their products at our kids, starting at 6 years old, 4 years old with YouTube. Brian, thank you for spending so much time with me. Parents everywhere are so grateful your words are heard and more children will be protected because of it. So we're super, super grateful for your time here today.

[Brian Boland]

That's the hope and I appreciate the voice that you've put out there of really telling the story and helping people understand.