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Social Media’s “Big Tobacco” Moment?
00:20:24
The big ruling from that big social media trial is in and it could have big implications for big tech going forward. Wikipedia bans the use of AI for creating Wikipedia entries. GitHub is about to train AI on what you do on GitHub. And the idea of lossless compression might sound like a Silicon Valley joke, but it could be a big deal.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Thursday, March 26, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Big ruling from that big social media trial is in and it could have big implications for big tech going forward. Wikipedia bans the use of AI for creating Wikipedia entries. GitHub is about to train AI on what you do on GitHub, and the idea of lossless compression might sound like a Silicon Valley joke, but it could be big deal. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech I told you these were coming in in that social media addiction trial, a Los Angeles jury has found Meta and YouTube were negligent and failed to warn users about the dangers of using their platforms. The jury awarded the plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. Meta will pay 70% and YouTube 30% of that. Quoting CNBC the personal injury trial commenced in late January in LA Superior Court. A young woman identified as kgm, or Kaylee alleged that she became addicted to apps like Instagram and YouTube as a child. Deliberations began Friday, March 13. Today's verdict is an historic moment for Kaylee and for the thousands of children and families who have been waiting for this day, attorneys representing the plaintiff said in a statement after the verdict. She showed extraordinary courage bringing this case and telling her story in open court. A jury of Caylee's peers heard the evidence, heard what meta and YouTube knew and when they knew it, and held them accountable for their conduct, end quote, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options, a Google spokesperson said in a statement. We disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal. This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site, end quote. It's one of several trials taking place this year that experts have characterized as the social media industry's big tobacco moment, comparing it to the 1990s, when tobacco companies were forced to pay billions of dollars for lying to the public about the safety and potential harms of their products. On Tuesday, jurors in Santa Fe, New Mexico found that Meta willfully violated the state's unfair practices after Attorney General Raul Torres alleged that the company failed to properly safeguard its apps from online predators targeting children. Meta, in that case, was ordered to pay $375 million in damages based the number of violations. The company said it would appeal that case as well. The New Mexico case is separate from other social media lawsuits that state attorneys general have brought against companies including Meta and TikTok. During the six week trial in LA, jury members were tasked with determining whether Meta and YouTube implemented certain design features in their apps like recommendation algorithms and autoplay that contributed to KGM's crippling mental distress. The 20 year old woman alleged that she suffered from severe body dysmorphia, depression and suicidal thoughts due to her near constant use of the apps and the constant notifications that made it difficult for her to stop. Meta and YouTube denied the plaintiff's claims and said they take safety and health concerns seriously and have implemented features intended to minimize potential harms. Attorneys representing the tech giants allege that KGM's mental health problems stemmed from a turbulent childhood and related family issues and that she used the services as a way to cope with trauma. The court chose the plaintiff's case as a bellwether to help determine verdicts in similar and connected litigation throughout the state of California under so called judicial counsel coordination proceedings. Although TikTok and Snap were originally part of the case, they settled with the plaintiff before the trial began and are still involved in other legal proceedings. A federal trial is set to begin this summer in the Northern District of California involving similar consolidated claims by school districts and parents nationwide. They claim apps from Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap helped foster detrimental mental health related harms to young users. A central legal strategy for prosecutors and plaintiff attorneys is to focus on alleged design flaws related to apps like Instagram and YouTube instead of specifically specific content in order to counter arguments made by tech companies that they shouldn't be held liable for certain third party content on their platforms due to section 230 which protects Internet speech. End quote. Yeah, but that's why this precedent could be such a big deal. These back to back jury verdicts against especially Meta could spur a flood of litigation against social media companies and also threatened to undermine Section 230 protections, generally quoting the Journal. That is the view of some legal experts, but also the stated position of Meta itself, which argued heading into the trials in California and New Mexico that for Juries to endorse the theory of the cases against them would challenge their ability to keep serving products used daily by billions of people. The judgments for the plaintiffs threaten to undermine long held protections that have shielded Internet companies for decades. They suggest future juries might be receptive to product liability arguments against social media, which forms the basis of thousands of similar lawsuits waiting to be heard. And they encourage new plaintiffs to come forward, raising the prospect of mass litigation that could stretch on for years and lead to settlements or changes in the industry akin to the legal campaign against the tobacco industry in the 1990s. The California case was the first trial of thousands of consolidated lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. More trials are scheduled for this year. TikTok and Snap settled the first case but are on the hook for others. Omari Ben Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the verdicts reflect an expansive view on tech companies liability for their products. What is new is the addiction element, he said. That could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction there is something very abstract about it. The ruling in the Los Angeles Bellwether case could have significant ramifications for Meta and a swath of other Internet platforms. The tech giants have long argued that they couldn't be held liable for the third party content posted to their platforms, citing Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That measure is credited in part with fueling the growth of social media companies. The plaintiff's lawyers in the Los Angeles case sidestepped Section 230 by arguing that the way the platforms themselves were designed was harmful and intentionally so. The success of that argument is now sending shockwaves through the tech world. This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, AI and beyond that, said Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives. The floodgates are already open ahead of the trials. Meta argued for the lawsuit to be thrown out and said that many of the design features at issue, such as instant notification and infinite scroll, were inescapably linked to the content shown to users. This could prompt a flood of litigation, it warned, causing the company to change how its products deliver information to avoid liability. Meta also said the cases erode Section 230 and First Amendment protections. Two jurors interviewed after the verdict said the eight days of deliberation were filled with questions about culpability and what signal they wanted their decisions to send to meta and YouTube. They had to weigh conflicting expert testimony and research about the harms of social media to young people. One juror, Victoria, who only gave her first name to protect her anonymity, said Zuckerberg's answers on the stand came across as inconsistent. That didn't sit well with us, she said. She said he seemed unprepared, a position she said was surprising for the guru whose products were at the center of this case. Victoria said she wasn't a regular user of social media before the trial. She planned to stay off it. End quote. I guess this was inevitable Nintendo says new first party games exclusive to its Switch 2 system will have different prices for physical and digital versions in the US Beginning in May. Quoting Video Games Chronicle the policy will begin with the release of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, with pre orders confirming that the platform game will retail for $10 more $70 phys than digitally. The pricing change comes amid expectations from some industry analysts that Nintendo could raise the price of Switch to consoles this year due to global manufacturing cost increases. Both Sony and Microsoft raised the price of their game consoles last year, driven by the impact from tariffs, increased memory costs and broader macroeconomic conditions. Nintendo chose to maintain its $449 entry price last year despite the introduction of tariffs impacting production in China, Japan and Vietnam, said a report from consumer insight firm Niko Partners in January. More recently, increased demand for AI data centers has pushed RAM and storage prices up. While we do anticipate Nintendo to increase the price of the Switch 2, they may opt to discontinue the $449 SKU and only sell a $499 or higher bundle SKU instead. Speaking February, Nintendo President Shantaro Furukawa said there were no plans to increase the price of Switch 2 due to increasing costs of memory, at least at that time. End quote Foreign.
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Disney plus let's go get ready for a new case.
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New friends Gary the Snake and your
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last name the Snake Dream Team New Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
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You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney plus rated PG and right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just free. $4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months plan auto renews at $12.99 a month. Terms apply.
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My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym pre K pickup back home to meal prep time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits.
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I'm ready.
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the World Moves fast. Your workday even faster Pitching products, drafting reports analyzing data Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot from the I
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could swear they already did this file Wikipedia has banned the use of AI for writing or rewriting articles on its English language site. Citing AI written articles Tendency to quote violate Core content Policies Quoting the Verge Wikipedia will no longer allow editors to write or rewrite articles using AI. The update, which was added to Wikipedia's guidelines late last week, cites the tendency for AI written articles to violate several of Wikipedia's core content policies as the reason for the ban. The change applies to the English language version of Wikipedia and will still allow editors to use AI in certain scenarios. That includes using large language models to suggest basic copy edits to their writing, but only if it does not introduce content of its own. Editors can also use AI to translate articles from another language into English. However, they still must follow the site's rules on LLM assisted translations, which require editors to have enough knowledge of the original language to confirm the accuracy of the translation. The new policy warns that some people may have similar writing styles to LLMs, and editors will need to find more than just stylistic or linguistic signs to justify potential restrictions on their editing capabilities. It is best to consider the text's compliance with core content policies and recent edits by the editor in question, the guidelines state. Wikipedia editors have been contending with AI generated articles for months now, leading the community to implement a new policy to allow for the speedy deletion of poorly written articles. Editors also formed Wiki Project AI Cleanup an initiative meant to combat AI written content and help others identify it. This most recent change to Wikipedia's guidelines was proposed by Chaotic nb, sparking a lengthy discussion between editors. The proposal eventually passed with quote, overwhelming support, concluding that the policy targets blatantly problematic issues with LLM use while still giving leeway for what are seen as decent uses for it. End quote. Warning developers GitHub says it will use Copilot interaction data, including inputs, outputs and code snippets, to train its AI models starting April 24. Unless you opt out quoting how to geek GitHub Copilot is the AI code assistance tool integrated in Visual Studio Code, the GitHub website, the Copilot CLI tool, which competes with Claude code and other services that includes any input or output data, code snippets, comments and documentation, file names, repository structure and other information. If you have never used GitHub Copilot in the first place, this won't change anything. However, if you've used the code completion in Visual Studio code, asked Copilot a question on the GitHub website, or used another related AI feature, your interactions and code snippets could be harvested. Importantly, the automatic data collection applies to both free and paid accounts. That includes Copilot Free Copilot Pro and Copilot Pro plus users, but not Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise accounts. You can pause the data collection from the Copilot Features page in your GitHub account settings after you are logged into your account. There's an allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training setting in the Privacy section. You just need to set that dropdown menu to disabled and that's it. If you have multiple GitHub accounts, be sure to do that for each of your accounts. Finally, paging the HBO show Silicon Valley cause Google has stolen your plot point, quoting TechCrunch if Google's AI researchers had a sense of humor, they would have called Turboquant the new ultra efficient AI memory compression algorithm announced Tuesday. Pied Piper. Or at least that's what the Internet thinks. The joke is a reference to the fictional startup Pied Piper that was the focus of HBO's Silicon Valley TV series that ran from 2014 to 2019. The show followed the startup's founders as they navigated the tech ecosystem, facing challenges like competition from larger companies, fundraising, technology and product issues, and even, much to our delight, wowing the judges at a fictional version of TechCrunch Disrupt. Pied Piper's breakthrough technology on the TV show was a compression algorithm that greatly reduced file sizes with near lossless compression. Google Research's new TurboQuant is also about extreme compression without quality loss, but applied to a core bottleneck in AI systems, hence the comparisons. Google Research described the technology as a novel way to shrink AI's working memory without impacting performance. The compression method, which uses a form of vector quantitation to clear cache bottlenecks in AI processing, would essentially allow AI to remember more information while taking up less space and maintain accuracy, according to the researchers. They plan to present their findings at the ICLR 2026 conference next month, along with the two methods that are making this compression possible, the quantization method Polarquant, and a training and optimization method called qjl. Understanding the math involved here is something researchers and computer scientists may be able to do, but the results are exciting to the wider tech industry as a whole. If successfully implemented in the real world, Turboquant could make AI cheaper to run by reducing its runtime working memory, known as the KV cache by at least some, like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, are even calling this Google's deep space moment, a reference to the efficiency gains driven by the Chinese AI model, which was trained at a fraction of the cost of its rivals on worse chips while remaining competitive on its results. Still, it's worth noting that Turboquant hasn't been deployed broadly. It's still a lab breakthrough at this time that makes comparisons with something like Deepseek or even the fictional Pied Piper more difficult on tv. Pied Piper's technology was going to radically change the rules of computing. Turboquant, meanwhile, could lead to efficiency gains in systems that require less memory during inference. But it wouldn't necessarily solve the wider RAM shortages driven by AI, given that it only targets inference memory, not training, the latter of which continues to require massive amounts of ram. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and Sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.