Naomi Nix (3:00)

So I can't post anything about what.

David Pierce (3:02)

Happened yesterday in Minnesota.

Naomi Nix (3:04)

So I'm going to be very selective with my words.

David Pierce (3:06)

If you talk about ice or anything political, if you're even talking about the weather, zero views, we're already seeing proof of suppression. There were people who were saying that if you DM'd the word Epstein to somebody else, that that wouldn't go through insanely.

Naomi Nix (3:19)

You now cannot use the word Epstein.

David Pierce (3:22)

In TikTok DMs and are immediately flagged for community viol.

Naomi Nix (3:27)

Can't use the word Epstein on TikTok since Trump allies took ownership. Absolutely.

David Pierce (3:31)

CCP levels of censorship. All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude, which is that TikTok's new data center provider, Oracle, had a huge outage. What we think we know is that it was a big data center in Virginia, had what they called a weather related issue, which I live in Virginia and I have spent a whole week having weather related issues.

Jonathan Hill (3:59)

Oh, there's still snow on the ground where I'm from.

David Pierce (4:02)

Yeah, I have a very hard time imagining anybody not having weather related issues right now. But so the, there was a big power outage. They've had big issues at the data center and that seems to be the actual culprit here. There are lots of good reasons to be worried about censorship. There are lots of potential censorship problems coming to TikTok, but rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately, like smashed a big red censorship button is pretty unlikely anyway. Very hard to do technically when you take over a platform this huge, to change it in any meaningful way just takes time. And it was in the middle of huge, disastrous technical problems that I think are probably the real answer here.

Jonathan Hill (4:43)

Is there a way for us to actually know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical of TikTok right now.

David Pierce (4:48)

I think one useful analog here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all of the changes he was intending to make. Right. We want to be just very reluctant to delete things. Just, just be very cautious with, with, with permanent bans. And this was after years of conservatives in particular saying that they were being censored by Twitter's existing leadership. So Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, I'm going to reverse that. Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like and then does a bunch of very obvious things that you go on the platform and you spend five minutes on it and it just felt different. You were seeing different posts. So I think there is a version of this that feels very obvious. It's just that for right now there are better, simpler, sort of Occam's Razor y explanations for what's going on.

Jonathan Hill (5:39)

California Governor Gavin Newsom says he's going to investigate TikTok censorship. Is there anything to that or is he just, you know, someone with 2028.

David Pierce (5:49)

On the brain in that particular one? I think it is 2028 brain. Pretty aggressively. Gavin Newsom was responding very directly to all of these reports that the word Epstein was being censored in DMs. That problem has largely gone away as Oracle's technical problems have gone away. But I think the fact that if you're Gavin Newsom, that is a politically useful thing to do is very telling. We've had this six year saga of what's going to happen to Tick Tock all the way back to the first Trump administration. At first, Donald Trump wanted to ban Tick Tock. We're looking at Tick Tock. We may be banning TikTok. And then Trump discovered pretty clearly how important TikTok was in getting him elected again in 2024.

Naomi Nix (6:31)

The US should be entitled to get.

David Pierce (6:32)

Half of Tick Tock and all of a sudden saw it as a politically useful platform and then engineered the thing to be sold to some of his close friends and allies, American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors. The biggest. If you just look at the set of things that has happened, it would be surprising if it doesn't end up being a politically geared right wing coded platform. And so if you're Gavin Newsom, to say I am going to be your champion to keep TikTok as the thing that you want and not turned into the kind of cesspool that X has become. It's a smart move.

Jonathan Hill (7:13)

I think something that's poured gas on. This is something that you mentioned, which is who these new owners are. Tell us about them.

David Pierce (7:20)

Sure. So the new owners of TikTok are essentially three players that matter. One is Oracle, the, the huge old Silicon Valley company owned by Larry Ellison, who is a very close friend of.

Jonathan Hill (7:34)

President Trump's, which we've covered on the show.

David Pierce (7:36)

Allison, meet the Ellisons, the newest right wing billionaire, mgx, which is an investment firm located in Abu Dhabi, and Silver Lake, which is a huge private equity firm that is invested in just everything you can possibly think of. Each of them has 15% of this new company. The new company is called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. It really just rolls off the tongue. Yeah, but everybody just calls it TikTok US. So for all intents and purposes, it's Oracle. MGX and Silver Lake are the controlling new investors in this company. And most importantly of all is Oracle. Right. Oracle is in charge of the algorithm, it's in charge of the privacy, it's in charge of the data security. All of the things that made this a national security issue in the first place are now up to Oracle to solve. So I think Larry Ellison is the single most important person for the new TikTok. Larry made his money with technology. You have this group of people with very similar politics with a very clear understanding of what you can do when you own a platform like this. And if you, if you look at TikTok and you say, okay, this is actually an incredibly valuable just information dissemination product in the United States and you are a political animal, of course you're going to look at that and say, actually this thing that we've been railing against, which is fears of the Chinese government, you know, melting our brains with dance crazes, we can just do that for our own purposes. There are lots of good and fair questions to ask about what the Chinese government was doing, both in terms of the data they were collecting about US Citizens and the way that the Chinese government might be skewing the algorithm to show certain things to Americans or not. But the difference now is we see what the government is doing right now instead of saying, okay, it's this sort of abstract big bad that is China. But you look around and it's like, okay, it's actually very obvious what the Trump administration is up to and the ways in which they want to control information and the ways in which fascism is creeping across the way that we communicate with each other in so many ways. And that is not abstract. And you can just say, oh, okay, if, if you give Donald Trump the means of showing people videos that they watch for hours a day, like, it's not unclear what he's going to do with it. And so I think this stuff is both sort of literally closer to home for a lot of these users, but also it's just much more obvious what it would look like if it goes wrong.

Jonathan Hill (10:01)

You know, what is also not abstract is that there were new terms of service that folks had to agree to. What do we know about what's changing?

David Pierce (10:10)

Okay, this is a tricky one because one of the very funny things about terms of service on, on apps like these is that they're always terrifying and they're often terrifying for totally non terrifying reasons. What happened in this case is there are some new things in the terms of Service. The new TikTok US is going to collect more precise location data if you allow it. It also gives TikTok permission to collect a bunch of data around kind of nebulous AI things that make it clear they're going to do a lot of sort of gen AI stuff inside of TikTok and that's data it can collect. But there was one thing that a lot of people got really nervous about.

Naomi Nix (10:48)

Your immigration status, your geolocation, your mental health diagnosis.

David Pierce (10:52)

This is the private information that TikTok is now lawfully collecting from you.

Naomi Nix (10:56)

They're going to know your citizenship and immigration status, your religious beliefs, your mental and physical health, sexual life, sexual orientation, also if you're transgender or non binary.

David Pierce (11:05)

It's just a lot, all of these things and actually that data has been in TikTok's terms of service for some time. Oh again, I think it is reasonable to be alarmed by this data is going to be collected by a new group of people and I think it is, it is fair to be worried about who that group of people is and what they might do with your data. But the sheer collection of that data is not new in TikTok. It's just that people finally read the terms of service.

Jonathan Hill (11:33)

Okay, so all of this is the business side, but let's say, you know, I'm out here scrolling and right now cooking videos, videos about makeup, videos of men cleaning horse hooves. Will my experience on the app change now? Is all of that gone for me?

David Pierce (11:49)

Okay, A we have shockingly similar timelines. This is very exciting. I love the horse hoof cleaning.

Jonathan Hill (11:54)

Shout out to Nate the hoof guy.

David Pierce (11:55)

Yes, in the past I've said that this is one of my favorite tools. And in today's video I'll show you exactly why. And all the comments are always like, doesn't that hurt? Anyway, you and I would never have searched for horse hoof cleaning videos, but the TikTok algorithm is clever enough to have shown them to us. And that is the thing that actually no other platform has done a good job of replicating. But now one of the stipulations of this deal is that there has to be some meaningful separation of that algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners are going to quote, retrain, test and update the algorithm. That is a very vague phrase, but it means in some way the algorithm is going to change, but that we're going to not see for a While.

Jonathan Hill (12:43)

Okay. And wait, one more question before we go.

David Pierce (12:45)

Sure.

Jonathan Hill (12:46)

Got to close the loop on the horse hooves. Does it hurt them when they get them cleaned?

David Pierce (12:51)

It doesn't hurt them because they don't have feelings on that part of their feet. And actually it feels good for them. You have to. You want to be a professional to do it, though. You and I should not be cleaning.

Jonathan Hill (13:00)

No, we should not. We should.

David Pierce (13:01)

But I'm glad that Nate's out there doing it.

Jonathan Hill (13:10)

Coming up on Today explained some major lawsuits. Alleged social media platforms are designed to be addictive. TikTok settled the first big one. But most of the rest of the social media world's headed to court.

David Pierce (13:37)

What if you could monitor the health of your career? For most people, it starts strong, a new job where anything's possible. But somewhere along the line, your career flatlines. You need to get to Strawberry Me, where a certified career coach will bring it back to life by putting together a plan for you to get ahead either at your current job or a new one. Go to Strawberry Me Unstuck and get 50% off your first coaching session. A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis and understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on the Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age and what it means to make sense of it all. All that plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok and more on the Vergecast. Wherever you get podcasts, What do you think Today explained this?

Naomi Nix (14:53)

I don't know. My name is Naomi Nix. I am a reporter at the Washington Post. I cover social media.

Jonathan Hill (15:02)

Okay, so there are some big social media lawsuits just getting underway. Why are these such a huge deal?

Naomi Nix (15:11)

Well, this is really the first time that social media addiction cases are going to be headed to a jury trial. Hundreds of parents, school districts, and state attorneys generals have filed lawsuits alleging that the way tech Companies like Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat have designed their products, have made them especially addictive to young people and that that has harmed teenagers and fueled a mental health crisis in today's young people.

David Pierce (15:44)

Today, the tech giants behind some of the most popular social media apps are headed to trial.

Jonathan Hill (15:49)

This case is the first of thousands.

David Pierce (15:51)

Of lawsuits that claim platforms like Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube knowingly created harmful products.

Naomi Nix (15:57)

A 19 year old anonymous plaintiff claims she got hooked to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at just 10 years old due.

Jonathan Hill (16:03)

To features like endless scrolling and frequent notifications.

David Pierce (16:06)

TikTok and Snapchat were also named, but they have already settled out of court, essentially.

Naomi Nix (16:12)

Jury selection has begun in the first of a cohort of social media addiction cases. It focuses on the story of a woman who's now a young adult. She is Anonymous, but goes by kgm and essentially she says she used all those social media platforms, you know, throughout her childhood.

David Pierce (16:37)

KGM has testified that social media use, quote, contributed to her anxiety and her depression and caused her to feel more insecure about herself.

Naomi Nix (16:49)

We should expect testimony from top executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, as well as this sort of debate about, you know, her own life. We've already seen in filings the confidence, like Google have alleged that there are other things going on in her life that may have contributed to her distress. And so that case will play out and they'll pivot to the next bellwether case.

Jonathan Hill (17:20)

Okay, so just to clarify, this is about whether teens are being harmed by addictive content or whether the platform themselves are addictive?

Naomi Nix (17:32)

It's really about the platform design. They focus on things like an endless stream of content. They focus on features like autoplay, on YouTube notifications, product features like that that they say are really designed to just keep people returning to their sites over and over and over again, leading to really harmful consequences, whether that's anxiety, whether that's depression, untimely death. And so they're kind of making claims that are similar to some of the claims that were hit to big tobacco companies way back when, when they said, hey, these products have been especially designed to be addictive. The companies also know that based on their own internal research. And they haven't really been upfront about the risks. In fact, they've been perhaps deceptive and have failed to protect young people in the way that they should.

Jonathan Hill (18:30)

Yeah, you know, these lawsuits are all about the addiction and harm that might be caused by social media. But what do we actually know about how addictive these platforms are? What do these studies tell us?

Naomi Nix (18:43)

It's a little murky, right? There's no such thing as, like social media addiction and the DSM that, you know, a psychologist is gonna like give you as a diagnosis and put on your insurance form. But there is a body of research, outside research certainly, that raises the question about whether social media usage can lead to or contribute to potential harmful mental health outcomes. And so there has been research that has perhaps drawn the conclusion that problematic use of social media or long periods of time of social media is correlated with, you know, poor mental distressing outcomes.

David Pierce (19:23)

A new study finds that excessive social media use can exacerbate depression in some young people. A new study has found a link between preteens use of social media and future depression. Direct correlational evidence that the more you use it, the more depressed you are.

Naomi Nix (19:38)

But there's other studies that don't establish that correlation.

David Pierce (19:41)

A study released last month from the University of Oxford found no evidence linking individual Facebook data to a negative well being. I don't think that a quick fix.

Naomi Nix (19:50)

Of taking the technology away or blocking.

David Pierce (19:52)

People will do a darn thing.

Naomi Nix (19:54)

And again, there has been an even sort of bigger debate in the academic community of is there, you know, even if you prove correlation, is there causation? How do we know that it's the social media platforms themselves that are causing the distress among, you know, those teens? Or is it just the fact that teens who are already kind of distressed for a variety of reasons, are turning to social media and perhaps using social media in problematic ways? And also, you know, where are the parents? I think this is a jury trial. And one of that's probably one of the obstacles they'll have to overcome is, well, how much is the tech company's responsibility and how much is. Are parents supposed to, you know, intervene and try to protect their kids? My guess is that that conversation will probably emerge as well.

Jonathan Hill (20:47)

You know, mental health, anxiety, depression, body image, those really get a spotlight in the worries about social media. But are there harms that we're not necessarily thinking about or talking about?

Naomi Nix (21:01)

Yeah, I mean, scams, sextortion scams have been, you know, one area I think regulators are paying increasing attention to where, particularly for targeting young boys, someone will post a photo of like a young, seemingly attractive woman. They'll engage a conversation, they'll get him to send compromising photos of himself and then threaten to send those photos to his friends and family if they, if he doesn't give over money and, and you know, he ends up in a vulnerable situation. And so there have been several cases in which, you know, that young child has committed suicide because it was so distressing to have that experience. Right. I think there's been a lot of attention around also technology in schools. We've seen an entire movement across the United States in which schools and school districts have banned phones within the schools because school districts themselves and some of the administrators are saying we're seeing the effects of phones on academic performance and the environment of the school and sleep. It's hard to have a debate about what the pro is for a teenager using social media at 2am when they probably when they have a test at 7am I do think that while some of this conversation around depression and anxiety has been a little bit nuanced among researchers, I do think there's other types of potential harms that the plaintiffs will be able to point to. The other thing they have on their side is just the document. There's only, you know, the companies have their own internal research in which they have looked at these issues, and that will be especially critical. I think in the case, a lot.

Jonathan Hill (22:51)

Of this focus on social media use is focused on young people. But if it this is a big tobacco moment. Cigarettes aren't just bad for kids, they're bad for adults too. As adults, should we be worried about these platforms being bad for us?

Naomi Nix (23:09)

I mean, I am for me, if not maybe as much as a mental health concern, but just of like, how do I want to spend my time? What's the best use of it? Is it connecting with the people that I care about? Is it, you know, pursuing work that makes me feel like a productive citizen? Or is it scrolling TikTok for three hours? Right. And I think one of the interesting things about this case is because it's a jury trial, my guess is the jurors are all going to relate to the issues like, they most likely have their own phones, they might have their own kids. They themselves, like many of us, may have had to sort of battle or have these conversations with themselves of like, how much am I using my phone? Which apps do I want to use? I think a lot of us can relate to these questions about phone usage and screen time. You know, what this case does is again, puts that question to the courts, which is like, are companies more responsible, more liable for the impact their services are having on young people? And this isn't just a new scandal with new internal documents or new whistleblowers, further shedding light on the ways these companies operate. This is sort of a new, potentially new avenue for people who think the companies need to be held more accountable to force or expand that liability. And that they made it to trial in this far is an accomplishment in of itself. Whether they'll win, you know, who knows?

Jonathan Hill (24:57)

Naomi Nix, Washington Post. Today's show was produced by Peter Balin on Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers. Fact checked by Andrea Lopez Cruzado engineered by David Tadashore and Patrick Boyd. I'm Jonathan Hill. This is today explained.