Opening of Meta trial on social media addiction claims

0:03Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. Are these social media giants about to be humbled, about to be cut down to size, forced to confront the planet-spanning ills of which they're accused? There are, so it's reported, just in the US, thousands of lawsuits in the offing against the big social media companies. But there's one which has started today, just a few hours ago to be precise, which is seen as potentially the biggest, most consequential of the lot, at least so far. 29 US states are coming together to accuse Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, of illegally collecting children's data and deliberately designing features to make kids into social media addicts.

0:52The prosecuting lawyers are demanding major changes to the way Meta operates the platforms and punitive damages. The BBC's North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali, has spent the day at the court in Oakland. Yes, it is a packed courtroom here in Oakland. We first heard from a deputy attorney general for the state of California, which is one of the states leading this case. Megan O 'Neill is her name. And Ms. O 'Neill talked about how Meta, in her words, hid the truth about its own research and how harmful its apps could be for kids. You really tried to draw a contrast between public statements from very high-level executives at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, including Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, trying to downplay or paint a portrait in front of Congress or in the media of these apps as being fairly safe and not problematic for kids.

1:48Whereas then she brought up internal documents, internal surveys, one from 2019 that showed that they were seeing pretty alarming stats for kids between the ages of 13 and 15. You know, a quarter of them in some cases were experiencing bullying on these platforms, were witnessing violence, nudity, and other things like that. So on the other hand, later this morning, we heard from Metta's lawyer who countered that it has been very transparent about the challenges that kids face when they use social media platforms and that it has done what it can to make its platforms safer, that this is something they take very seriously.

2:27Who are we expecting to be called as witnesses in this case that, well, I heard yesterday on NewsHour from Rob Bonta, the California Attorney General, he told me it was going to last seven weeks. So who are we going to hear from? Yes, and we did see Mr. Bonta walking into the courthouse. He is here along with a couple of other attorneys general in the courtroom today. We're going to hear first from Arturo Behar, who I think will be a really interesting witness. He is a meta whistleblower. He had worked at the company back when it was called Facebook, left and then, you know, has had his own experience with his daughter and what she was seeing on Instagram.

3:07And so it actually prompted him to go back to the company in the effort to try and make change. And he was very disappointed in what he saw there. In his telling of things, he did alert people at the highest level of Metta as to what was going on and was basically ignored. So we're going to hear from him next. We're going to possibly hear from Mark Zuckerberg. That is, we did hear Metta's lawyers just say that jurors will hear from him. We don't know if that will be in person or in the form of a videotaped deposition, but certainly he is going to be one of the most high profile witnesses to take, to be heard from by jurors in this case.

3:49Lily Jamali, just outside the courtroom in Oakland. Well, as I mentioned, I spoke on Monday's programme to California's Attorney General Rob Bonta. He told me more about why this consortium of US states is bringing the case and also just wanted to deny this report that they'd been, well, everybody seemed to be reporting that they were seeking a trillion dollars in damages. We want them to stop harming our kids knowingly. They designed a dangerous product. It was something they knew was dangerous and they lied to the public about it. So we want them to end those practices, stop visiting harm upon our kids.

4:26They're the features that they have, including infinite scroll and autoplay and beeps and alerts and likes and ephemeral content. Hurt kids, they create anxiety, depression, body image issues, learning loss, addictive tendencies. And as a father and the attorney general for the largest state in the nation, I want to protect our kids. So this is something that Meta is doing. It's also an industry-wide issue that we want addressed industry-wide. And we also want them to pay consistent with the law for the harm that they've done in the form of civil penalties, restitution and disgorgement. The over$1 trillion number that you mentioned is Meta's number.

5:02That's not our number. The judge will decide what the ultimate appropriate penalty will be. It's likely to be much less than over a trillion dollars. I think they're inflating that to make some arguments in the court of public opinion. But it will be significant. And we do want those penalties and, you know, that restitution and that disgorgement. Yes, you've come up with a litany of things which you say harm children, are addictive. You listed some of those features. I mean, Meta, we did ask them for an interview. They didn't want to give us one, but they did give us a statement saying that basically these claims that these features are as pernicious as you say are, I mean, essentially, well, their word unsubstantiated.

5:42They say that these features are benign features and you've got no proof that they actually harm the residents of the state that you are attorney general of. Well, beg to differ. And, you know, this is why they need to be held accountable. They've been, you know, it's a it's a pretty bold position, minimalist and reductionist in its approach to given that they've been losing massively in court up to now. And we believe they will lose here again. We do have evidence. We're ready to have those witnesses testify in trial and present our evidence in trial. And the most damning part of it is they knew that these features hurt children.

6:18They knew internally through their own internal studies. They reviewed those studies. They knew that their products were dangerous and they doubled down on them. Well, as I mentioned, Meta strongly denies the allegations put to it. That was Rob Bonta, California's attorney general, by the way. Meta strongly denies the allegations that he was making, insisting that it does take children's safety seriously. He's made many changes to that effect, the company says, and it does have its supporters outside the industry. Stephen Moore is a former senior economic advisor to President Trump. He's been speaking to my colleague Anna Foster.

6:54So this has become a political football here in the United States where many of the state attorney generals and private parties are going after meta for harm that might have been caused by material that is on the Internet. This is, in my opinion, just a cash payday for trial lawyers and others who feel like they can go after meta and technology companies because they have deep pockets. But we've always believed that the Internet should be regulation free and tax free. It's one of the reasons the U.S. has come to dominate the Internet age, because we kept the government away from the Internet and made parents responsible for what their kids were watching and seeing, not the companies that that make the Internet possible.

7:43You have people who've worked for Meta who have subsequently come out and said this was something that the company was actively trying to do, not just provide a service, but provide a service that became addictive and had elements of it designed and specifically made to make people not want to switch off. Does that concern you? Well, I think this is one of a classic case of individual responsibility versus, you know, versus what companies are doing. It wasn't so long ago people were making that claim about, you know, TV shows that, you know, they were addicting kids to watching TV. Stephen Moore talking to Anna Foster.

8:25Listening to all of that was Sonia Livingston. She's a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and an expert on children's rights in the digital age. One of the things that must be difficult to draw the line over is where features that are attractive to kids become addictive to kids. Does she think that line is clear? I think it's hard to say for individual features. I think what's significant about the meta platform and as research shows, it's that combination of features that leads many children that we hear from in research to say they look at it for, they look at their phone for an hour and, you know, five hours is gone or it's hard to look away or there's always one more video to watch, one more reel to engage with.

9:15And so to children, it feels overwhelming and it feels an enormous kind of pressure to be a certain way and be interested in certain things which might be very hard for them to take or to manage. And so, yes, for them, they do increasingly describe themselves as addicted. And is it possible to generalise, and I know that you're doing it partly because of the demands of concision for broadcast news, but is it possible to generalise in that way about children? Because I guess also the difference is, you know, with cigarettes, we know that for everybody, smoking a cigarette is going to be bad for you.

9:57Social media isn't necessarily bad for everybody. And presumably that's also the case for all, you know, when we're generalising about children. I agree but I don't think that's what's at issue here I don't think we need to so the tobacco is is one metaphor you know crossing a road might be another it's not that every child is is hurt on the road but there are sufficient children hurt on the road that we bring in regulation to make the road safe and to make cars safe and I think that's the claim here that there are sufficient children to really be a major cause for concern, even though absolutely there are many children who are kind of navigating this rather difficult terrain and finding their own way to content and connections that they truly value.

10:47And what do you make of the use of these, essentially of litigation in order to try and force the social media giants to change the way in which they operate? Because obviously one of the much-discussed tools, at least in politicians' toolboxes at the moment, is the idea of age controls. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that it's better to deal with this at source? Well, I think it's interesting for people listening in countries that do regulation in advance of the harm to try to prevent harm. So that's certainly the case in Britain and in Europe and also now in Brazil and many places around the world where there is regulation in place that specifies the age at which children can access social media platforms and then what it is that would make those platforms safe and to reduce the risk on them.

11:49And America is a different case. And the challenge for the rest of the world is that the big platforms that children use everywhere are headquartered in Silicon Valley and subject primarily to American law. So, you know, I think we watch these cases come to court and they are coming thick and fast now. I guess to see if the American approach to litigation is going to prove successful, perhaps more successful, we don't know yet, compared with the British or European or other approaches. So it's certainly a kind of pincer action on Meta and actually also TikTok and other platforms that these different kinds of legal strategy are now being tried at scale.

12:40And we hope that, I guess many hope, those of us who listen to children and talk to children and kind of understand the effects on their lives. And that was Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. This is News Hour. Still to come on the programme, a colour-based therapy to help correct short-sightedness and test it on tree shrews. So you give them spectacles and you give them spectacles, one lens of which for one eye projects the images that are coming into their eye behind the retina. And so the eye is able to respond to the mispositioning of that image by growing too long.

13:26It's that long axis that is the fundamental problem with myopia. More on that fascinating research on tree shrews in spectacles. That's coming up in 25 minutes. Our main headline this hour is we've been saying a landmark trial has begun in California where the tech giant Meta is accused of deliberately making Facebook and Instagram addictive for children.

13:59Here with the BBC World Service and live from London, this is NewsHour with me, Tim Franks. Ukraine suffered another punishing wave of airstrikes from Russia last night. At least 17 people are reported to have died. Meanwhile, Ukraine's own military intelligence service, known as the GER, is continuing its work to probe Russia's internal weaknesses. In his secret location in Kyiv, our Ukraine correspondent Dan Johnson has been speaking to Vadim Skibertsky, deputy chief of the GER. He started by asking him about Ukraine's latest strategy of deep-range drone strikes, hundreds, even thousands of kilometres into Russia, and how the military plans to grind down Moscow.

14:40We should destroy and disrupt, first of all, production, weaponry. And that is why one of the main targets, main object for us is the defense industry. And, of course, next one, logistic system, including, in some case, Wildberries, for example. Why? Because it's one of the elements of the logistic system of Russian Federation to wage the war, including, for example, through wildberries, some military equipment, military components, and other elements that Russian Federation uses for war. Will those deep strikes continue? Unfortunately. Even if more Russian civilians are killed? First of all, I said we must destroy and disrupt the main elements of the wage of war of Russian Federation, not civilian people.

15:31Do you see evidence that those deep strikes are increasing opposition to the Kremlin, not increasing its support? It's really influence on the population of the Russian Federation, because the understanding concerning the air defense system of the Russian Federation, concerning the capability of Russian authority to prevent or protect some areas. Of course, another problem today for the Russian Federation is the level of life of the population. It's the prosperity for normal life in any country. What is the thing that worries you the most when you consider the different threats Russia poses? First of all, today we really understand that possible threat in the winter period of time, especially, for example, destroy, disrupt water supply system, heating system, electricity system, and facilities for normal life of civilian population.

16:28And do you have the intelligence that those sorts of attacks are being planned by Russia? Due to our capability, defense, intelligence of Ukraine, we absolutely understand the plans. Knowledge is absolutely good, but without the air defense, without another weapons, including weapons and ammunition, it's very hard to protect all territory of Ukraine. Do you think ordinary Ukrainian people are going to feel the impact of that even more this winter than last? Yes, I think you know that every day we have the wounded and dead civilian population in many regions. And unfortunately, with increasing number of the drones, some missile system, Russian Federation, it's really the threat and challenge can increase the losses of civilian population in the other country.

17:25Some people would say then that is the evidence that Ukraine is not winning this war. We have not another way for surviving because we're an independent state. It's our territory. It's our land. It's our culture. It's our history. We must fight to prevent the full occupation of Russian Federation. Do you think you are winning? I think yes. and that was Vadim Skibetsky Deputy Chief of Ukraine's Military Intelligence speaking to Dan Johnson in Kiev Dutch police have put out an unusual call today a call for information about a man who's picked up unwell on the streets of Amsterdam back in 2023 and has been living largely unable to communicate in a nursing home ever since the unusual part of this is that the Amsterdam police force decided today for the first time to publish a photo the man.

18:19Lex van Liebergen is a spokeswoman for the force. She told me why. We've been investigating this for three years now and we got a lot of information about him. We actually know a lot of people who spoke with him, where he lived and what he did in his life. But still we could not find out his real identity. And then now we actually started to share his picture of his face to the people. But this is a very drastic thing to do, actually. So this is not something that you do lightly. And that is why we actually did a lot of investigation beforehand, before we really thought of this last measure. And we really, really hope that people see this picture and recognize him.

19:06Right. And I've got the picture in front of me. And it's of this man, He's resting on a pillow. I mean, he looks, I am no doctor, but he looks in good health. He looks like a sort of a healthy older man. And he's got a very inquisitive look to his face as well. Are there any details about him that you can share? I can understand that people think it's quite strange because he looks like someone you can just speak with. But he has diagnosed aphasia. So that's a brain-related condition where you cannot speak, you cannot read, you cannot write, and maybe not even understand language from people who speak to you.

19:54So that is why it's really, really hard to communicate with him and to know who he is. But fortunately, we did find out a little about him. For example, where he lived. So he has a house in Amsterdam, or he had. So we spoke with his landlord. But then the landlord told us, yeah, this man, he paid me the rent in cash. So I don't actually have a lot of information about him. So we don't know if he had any bank accounts of some sort. So these are all things that makes it very difficult to know who he actually really is. And then we spoke with people who knew him because he was attending some Buddhist temple here in Amsterdam.

20:38He joined a Buddhist community. So people knew him, but he had a lot of different names. People called him Lucky. People called him John. People called him Lee. People called him Chris. So that makes it very difficult to find out who he actually is. So you mentioned some lines of inquiry which haven't really borne a huge amount of fruit. I guess some people might be wondering, well, can you not sort of use fingerprints or DNA? So we have several databases when it comes to fingerprints. One is for missing persons and unidentified people who are deceased. And another one is for suspects and criminals.

21:18But the thing is, you cannot mix those databases up in case of privacy. So that is why we could not use this particular database because, yeah, Lucky is not formally a suspect. And there are reports that he speaks with a North American accent. Is that correct? Yeah. So the people we spoke that knew him, they told us that he was speaking in English and that it sounded like American or maybe Canadian. So that is why we also informed the United States of America and Canada that we were looking for a man that looks like him. And we hoped actually to find out already who he is, but that was also a dead end.

22:04So that's why we showed his picture today. Are you able to say, and I understand that communication with him is extremely limited, and I also understand that you have to respect his privacy. But do you get or do the investigators get a sense that he is frustrated about the fact that he doesn't know who he is or you don't know who he is? Is there any frustration from him about that? I didn't see him myself, so I'm not sure. But I know that he was responding positively to the question if we could use his picture to show to the world to find out his identity. So I think there is a wish for him to see someone he knows.

22:49There must be people in the world that know him. And that was Lex van Liebergen, spokeswoman for the Amsterdam Police Force. This is News Hour. Welcome back to News Hour. The production of wool has a long history in the United Kingdom. It was first spun and woven into cloth in the Bronze Age, became Britain's most important export in the 12th century. Over the past year, the price of wool has increased by more than 70%, climbing after a global stockpile produced during the pandemic had begun at last to dwindle. Here's our Wales correspondent, Hal Griffith.

23:28As spectator sports go, competitive sheep shearing may not be mainstream, but it always draws a crowd at the annual Royal Welsh Agricultural Show. This year, the sheep farmers visiting had reason to be cheerful. The money they receive for each fleece has been rising. On average, it's up 70 % on last year. According to Gareth Jones from British Wool, it's part of a commodity boom, shaped by international supply and demand. If we look at the global markets, there's less sheep in Wales, less sheep in the UK producing less wool. But if we look at a comparable market to us, like New Zealand, there's less sheep in New Zealand now.

24:12And they also had a carryover of wool since Covid. That's cleared in the last two years now. So the limited supply that we have, including the increased demand, is increasing, obviously, the competition in the auction, which farmers are going to see the benefits of that. And where's that demand coming from? So we see it in the domestic market. So 50 % of our wool stays here in the UK. We have 180 brands who are working with us, who are specifying British wool in their products. But we also have China, which is an important market for us. We also have a bedding manufacturer in South Korea. And also we have some licensees in Japan.

24:46So it's very much, here in Wales, we're producing a fantastic fibre, but it's in demand worldwide. Come on. On his farm in the hills above Llanfair Cerenion in mid-Wales, Wyn Williams keeps a flock of around 700 sheep. He's been here for the last 38 years, rearing mainly for meat. But what he gets for the wool makes a real difference. There's not everybody that can shear. And also your helpers, the wool wrappers and everything, it assists with the cost of the... And most importantly, we have to shear from an animal welfare and health perspective. Who would want a big, big, strong winter coat still on with the excessive heat that we've got at the moon?

25:35Wool has been spun in Britain since the Bronze Age and while technology's changed over the centuries, the process of sorting through each fleece is still done by hand. At a depot in Newtown, Barry Bellis says he can recognise 68 different grades of wool, from the finest destined for knitwear to the coarser kind that could end up in carpets or even slug pellets. If you've got a nice white fleece like that one, you're able to dye that pink, green, blue, whatever colour you want. So there's more value to this fleece than there is this one, whereas this type of fleece, that will tend to go into a carpet blend and stuff like that because of the colour.

26:14Rising wool prices aren't necessarily good news for shoppers, of course, but they do offer reward for one of Britain's oldest industries. And that was our Wales correspondent, Hal Griffith, reporting on the renaissance of wool. This is News Hour. It's coming to you live from the BBC in London with me, Tim Franks. It was just a week ago that a Syrian court handed down a sentence, a sentence of death, on Bashar al-Assad, the dictator whose regime of repression and fear imprisoned, tortured, disappeared and killed countless thousands. even before the terrors of the prolonged civil war. It was a sentence handed down in absentia, of course.

26:59The former dictator who fled Damascus in December 2024 is currently living in Moscow. But today a cousin of his, Wasim al-Assad, an infamous enforcer of the regime, was convicted in person, in a court, in Damascus.

27:18In the name of the Arab people of Syria, we have reached a unanimous decision, first to convict Wasim al-Assad of the crimes of murder and serial killings with intent. The start of judgment being handed down on Wasim al-Assad today, he ended up being sentenced to death for his crimes. Our Middle East analyst Sebastian Asher gave us a brief portrait of the trial and the man. This is a key case as far as accountability for the crimes committed under the Assad regime during the Civil War. Wassimal Assad, a cousin of Bashar, he was one of the enforcers, shall we say, not one of the absolute top ones, but he certainly played a role.

28:04The crimes which he has been convicted of, a lot of them relate to a part of Damascus called Eastern Ghouta. People may remember from a war the images from there. And when you go to Damascus now, nothing has changed. It's essentially a scene of utter devastation. It was one of the biggest battles between the government forces and the rebels. He recruited and he led pro-regime militias. So he's accused of multiple murders in that, but also of kidnapping, torture and killing opponents of the former regime. I think what is interesting, though, is what he's not been convicted of and what in some ways he was best known for, his alleged involvement in the multi-billion dollar drug trafficking network, which essentially kept the Bashar Assad regime afloat financially during the years of the civil war, particularly with the drug Captagon, the amphetamine, which was being produced in industrial quantities.

29:01he was found not guilty of those charges, although he's been sanctioned for them internationally because of lack of evidence. Middle East analyst Sebastian Usher. So what are Syrians saying? Jamal Mansour is a Syrian-Palestinian who moved to Canada in 2012 as the Syrian uprising turned into that terrible civil war. These days he's a lecturer in political science at the University of Toronto. Me and a lot of Syrians never thought we would live to see the day when Syria was free from the Assad family, let alone to see anyone from the Assad family, especially someone as heinous and as violent, as completely thuggish as Wassim al-Assad, behind bars, being handed down a sentence.