Meta and YouTube lose in a landmark trial

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. A jury in Los Angeles has said that Meta and YouTube are responsible for a young woman's childhood addiction to social media. Kayleigh, the plaintiff, has been awarded$6 million in damages. It's a small payout compared to the sheer billions these tech giants make, but it could open the floodgates to hundreds of other cases making their way through the courts.

1:15Now at the heart of this is the question of whether these companies are intentionally building these apps to be addictive. It's a question our colleague, Mariana Spring, the BBC's social media investigations correspondent, has been digging into for more than a year. Coming up, we talk to Mariana about her exclusive interviews with whistleblowers from inside the tech giants. People who told her that the companies took risks with user safety when they decided to allow more harmful content on people's feeds. Allegations the companies deny. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. And I'm Tristan Redman in London.

1:56And today on The Global Story, could social media companies be forced to change their algorithms?

2:10Marianna Spring:My name is Marianna Spring and I'm the BBC's social media investigations correspondent. Great to have you back with us, Marianna. Thanks for having me. Well, we've got a lot to talk about because you cover social media companies and algorithms and all of the above. Now, a jury has just found Meta and YouTube negligent in this block bluster trial in Los Angeles. What exactly were they found negligent of? So what's really interesting is that this case that has been unfolding, and it's one of many cases that are currently kind of making their way through the courts in the US. This is about addiction and about design.

2:47Marianna Spring:So the case, this particular case, has revolved around a 20-year-old woman who essentially said, my mental health was seriously impacted by the addictive nature of your platforms. And I'm going to prove to you that was the case. And I'm going to prove to you that you knew that was the case and you still went on with it anyways. So actually, this is all about design. It's about the way that the platforms were built and the impact that that has. And the woman who is known as Kaylee has been awarded$6 million in damages. Obviously, as you might imagine, Meta and Google do not agree with the outcome of this.

3:19Marianna Spring:They say that it's not the case that they have built platforms that are harmful and addictive in this way. Meta said, quote, teen mental health is profoundly complex, cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves rigorously as every case is different and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online. And a spokesperson for Google said this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. And the reason that, for example, Meta say every case is different is because there are these other cases. And the broad feeling is that this sets a bit of a precedent, really, and that the other cases are unlikely to go in a different direction.

3:55Marianna Spring:because once you agree on this principle of the way these platforms are designed causes harm, you can kind of make a whole variety of arguments and the evidence is ultimately the same. I've been messaging various people who work inside the major social media companies who still do, who have done, and I think quite a few of them were taken aback by just how clear and assertive the judgment was here, that actually they determined that Meta and Google acted with malice, oppression or fraud in the way the companies operate their platforms. Can we just sit with the verdict for a minute? Because I realize$6 million, it might sound a lot to you and me, but it is a fraction of what the profits are for these companies.

4:35Nonetheless, I mean, this is historic. I mean, we've never seen a verdict like this one.

4:40Marianna Spring:Yeah, and I think that actually the main impact of this case is not necessarily the money like you say. I mean, these companies make huge amounts of money. And even if they had to pay out this several times over, it wouldn't really dent the amount that they make. The issue is, is that they are operating in an environment where there are increasing concerns from not just people who use the platforms, but from policymakers and politicians. And so if you're Meta or Google or any of the social media companies, you're thinking, oh, whoa, hold on a second. This is just another thing that adds to the kind of drip, drip, drip effect of people saying, wait, you guys can't be trusted to regulate yourselves.

5:22Marianna Spring:and actually you are going to have to either take some really decisive action when it comes to your design or if you're not able to do that then certain age groups and people just can't use the platform which is very not good from a financial point of view more so than any of these finds like they're much more worried about losing hyper-engaged young users who are the future of their platforms at the center of this case and also at the center of a lot of the work that you do were things like algorithms, autoplay, all sorts of devices that social media companies allegedly use to keep people on their platforms.

5:59What did the ruling in court actually say about things like algorithms and autoplay?

6:04Marianna Spring:So a lot of the case focused on the personal experience of Kayleigh, but actually in lots of ways. I mean, it's an experience I hear time and time again from different teenagers and different young people. She said she started using Instagram when she was nine, YouTube when she was six. So you've got kind of first thing is not blocking people who are too young to be on the platform. She then said that from a really young age, so from sort of 10 or so, she started developing anxiety, depression, disorders, which she would be diagnosed with later. And a lot of this came from kind of the obsession with her physical appearance and filters.

6:37Marianna Spring:So that's another kind of aspect of it, that you can put filters on images on Instagram and that those were distorting her perception of what she looked like and what other people look like. So those are things that have been introduced to kind of make the platforms more engaging. But in her case, she's saying, well, they actually they did make them more engaging, but they had a negative effect on her. And then things like infinite scroll. So this is where on Instagram, for example, you just never run out of posts. Like you can just refresh, refresh, refresh, and you're just going to get more posts.

7:06Marianna Spring:And essentially, her lawyers were arguing that all of those design features were introduced with the goal of keeping people like Kayleigh hooked. And the companies knew that that wasn't necessarily going to be safe or positive for them. But they plowed on with it anyways, because ultimately they make a fair bit of money. I think the thing that's interesting is the social media companies have always really strongly argued against the use of the word addiction. And even when I speak to people within the companies who've left the companies, say, and don't agree entirely with how they operate, everyone's quite wary of that word addiction.

7:41So, Mariana, to be clear, in the end, did the jurors find that Meta and Google intentionally built these apps to be addictive?

7:50Marianna Spring:Yeah, so the jury did rule that not just that the apps are addictive, but that they are deliberately engineered to be addictive. And that is why they decided that the owners have been negligent and they haven't protected kids in the way that they should. Mariana, you mentioned intentions. So let's talk more about intentions and the way that social media companies are building algorithms. You have been doing this fantastic big investigation in which you heard from whistleblowers inside some of these social media companies like TikTok and Meta. What were the main allegations? Yeah, so I've spent the past year, really, more than a year, speaking to a range of different people who work in all sorts of teams within these social media companies.

8:29Marianna Spring:They're people who've not spoken out before, the majority of them. Some of them are whistleblowers who've shared documentation with me to back up what they're saying. Others talk about their first-hand experiences. Quite a lot of them have done it on camera, so they're doing it in their own names. Some of them are anonymous just to protect them because they still work within the industry or within the companies. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My main takeaway from doing the investigation was that the algorithmic systems are essentially responsible for almost all of the harms that we point to all the time.

8:58Marianna Spring:So a lot of the time we're kind of saying, oh, look, people are seeing this kind of thing or this, you know, kids are exposed to this sort of content. It's ultimately about the design of the platforms and the systems. So are you saying that the main takeaway you had from the whistleblowers you spoke with is that the design, the algorithms are at fault more so than the actual content? It's not like Tristan or Asma is out there spouting this like crazy, hateful thing. It's that the algorithm is boosting perhaps like harmful misinformation, racist, rage-baity posts. Yeah, yeah, essentially that. I mean, obviously the people who post this stuff are responsible for what they post, but I think most people would be fine if this stuff wasn't being seen by millions of people.

9:39Marianna Spring:The difference is when it's being actively recommended and pushed to people. And that's why it kept coming back to the design and it kept coming back to this issue of intentionality, which is what the companies are saying outwardly does not match up with what is going on on the inside. And there are various reasons that the whistleblowers and insiders give for that. Some is to do with business and competing with other companies. Some is to do with this kind of cognitive dissonance sometimes between like what the companies sort of say that they think they're doing and then what is actually happening.

10:10Marianna Spring:It's sort of like being gaslit perpetually, which is why it's such a relief to speak to the people within the companies because they'll say, no, no, no, this is what I was actually doing or this is what we were told to do or this is what I saw. Well, I wanted to ask you about one of these moments of dissonance, which is when Mark Zuckerberg goes to Congress in 2018. It's a sort of moment, a kind of humbling moment where he has to apologise for accusations that his companies destabilise different parts of the world. and I wonder if you could explain what happens next because it surprised me. Yeah, so there was this change that happened in that period of time, sort of around 2018, which was Facebook at the time, contributing to violence in Myanmar.

10:48Marianna Spring:After that, there was this kind of moment that felt like a bit of a moment of reckoning where people like Mark Zuckerberg came forward and said, look, we take responsibility for not necessarily handling this as responsibly as we could have and we're going to do better. and the company kind of said, oh, Meta, which was then Facebook, said, let's try and go back to what we used to be like, like when it used to be just your friends and your family and people that you know. And this is this idea of sort of meaningful social interaction, this metric that they could use to say, right, we're going to make sure that actually you see more stuff from people that you know and that you like and you're kind of seeing less stuff from random people or from news outlets or, you know, about politics and those kinds of things.

11:27So it's a sort of back to basics idea.

11:29Marianna Spring:The idea, yes. The problem was is that you started to see how your next door neighbor or your uncle, who perhaps believes a really strange conspiracy theory, they're getting as much prominence as a reputable journalistic outlet. And that is then the problem. It's not like you're having meaningful interaction with these people. It's just amplifying the voices that offer the most outrageous, the most extreme ideas because they get the most engagement and so on and so forth. And so you end up in a place where actually the fix has made the issue worse. Remember, this is all around the pandemic. I mean, you can think of all the kinds of stuff that was spreading during COVID, like the amount of misinformation about vaccines, about the virus.

12:10Marianna Spring:And by misinformation, I don't mean legitimate questions about restrictions. I mean, it's a hoax. The vaccine is going to kill millions of people. All of these things that are just explicitly disinformation. Can I just ask that? Isn't the counter argument to that, though, that the platform genuinely is a mirror on the world then? Because they are just showing you your crazy uncle. The problem is, is that that would be OK if your crazy uncle had the same prominence as your very reasonable best friend. But ultimately, the crazy uncle is being given more of a platform. Like you would see his posts more often.

12:45Yeah, because they get more engagement.

12:46Marianna Spring:if someone posts something really boring, like, hello, today I cooked some banana bread and sat in my garden. Versus if someone says... Tristan, this explains why your social media posts don't get as much engagement. Tristan's like, aha! Whereas someone says, COVID is a hoax and it never happened and I know the secret. There's a secret plot happening and I'm going to tell you the truth. But politeness, yeah, it doesn't get you that far. No, no, just because the way that the systems are built is fundamentally on emotion and emotions like outrage are especially strong. and that's why you end up in this place.

13:16Marianna Spring:And again, this is the argument against the mirror thing. Algorithms are active. They're not passive things. They are making decisions to put certain bits of content over other bits of content, to push you certain bits. The algorithm is perceiving what you engage with, what you spend time on, what you're hovering over, what you interact with, and giving you more of that. And so that will always bias the platforms towards stuff that is reactive. And then, Mariana, to complicate the situation even more, in 2018, so this is around the same time this is all happening, TikTok burst on the scene here in the United States.

13:51And it quickly became a huge hit. And my understanding, in part from your reporting, is that that really complicates the situation for Meta, which at the time owns Instagram. And how much does that big tech rivalry fuel the decisions around algorithms?

14:08Marianna Spring:Yeah, so TikTok, and I think the pandemic did play a big part in this as well, because TikTok started to become popular before the pandemic. And then the pandemic happens in 2020. And everyone has nothing to do. And there's this new, very sort of exciting short form video platform where you can consume huge amounts of content. And it's not from anyone you follow. In fact, it's kind of the opposite of the meaningful social interaction stuff. So you're not seeing your uncle? You actually don't know. You're actually seeing just like anyone, anyone and everyone. And actually, you don't need to follow anyone on TikTok to just see the same creators to see the people that you want to see.

14:41Marianna Spring:I mean, TikTok emerges and then lots of people I've spoken to on the Insider Meta, say, including Matt, another insider who's an engineer, say to me, look, they just said, we've got to compete here. We can't not compete. And they launch Reels, which is their equivalent, Instagram and Facebook's equivalent of TikTok. But the problem is, whenever you introduce a new anything and you haven't necessarily tested it en masse, there's obviously going to be room for Any time you're introducing a new type of product, say reels, there's an elevated risk because the infrastructure that existed before, it's either completely absent or it's very immature.

15:19So it's hard to prepare sufficiently in advance of that launch because there's a common tradeoff between protecting people from harmful content and engagement. it.

15:32Marianna Spring:The issue was is that there was a real uptick in the prevalence of certain harmful content in the comments. So violence, incitement, bullying and harassment, that kind of stuff. In feed, you have to convince the team that owns feed or that owns reels to sign off on the product change that you want. But there's this power imbalance. They have incentives to not let those products launch because toxic stuff gets more engagement than non-toxic. And Matt's argument as someone who worked in safety was why you like your approach was move fast and break things and you've done that but the problem is is that you've basically left a load of people at risk when you should have properly tested this out before you did that or built the necessary guardrails.

16:19Marianna Spring:Instead you focused on just making the kind of new feature as popular as possible and now and now we're in a pickle. The most concerning thing is, is that you had people like Matt who were presenting this kind of evidence to senior management and seemingly there doesn't seem to, like, obviously they can then remedy those issues, but they've already happened. The impact on the users has already felt, particularly teenagers, and you can't undo that. And I think that's the issue really, is that people almost don't realise that they are the guinea pigs and the test cases all the time for these new features.

16:59So we're having this conversation with you in the context of the landmark social media trial we saw just this week. And in that case, as we mentioned, the plaintiff said that social media platforms had seriously harmed her mental health. And that reminded me of one of the people that you spoke with in your reporting. And that was a young man by the name of Callum who said that he was also affected as a teenager by algorithms. but in a very different way. Can you tell us about him?

17:28Marianna Spring:Yeah, so Callum was about 14 when he got really hooked on social media. He says that he was using most of the major platforms really and watching initially content that was about politics. It started with immigration for me. I was sort of the perfect candidate. When I was 13 and 14, I was kind of struggling with a lot of insecurities around my ability to have friends and relationships. And then you start getting recommended there are other fields in that space where it then talks about feminism and then talks about LGBT rights. And then all of a sudden, you hear from a perspective that sounds reasonable at first.

18:07And then a couple months later, you believe literally everything in that space. But to be clear, Mariana, did he say he did not have these opinions or attitudes prior to this? Not at all. Or he didn't have people in his real life who...

18:19Marianna Spring:No, not at all. It was like really out of step with his general experience growing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And he noticed how much it correlated with the time spent on these platforms and how much he was consuming this kind of content. And the thing that, and this happened over a period of time, over several years. And it was only when he sort of was sort of 17, 18 years old and he went to a different school. And in real life, he was encountering people that were the kinds of people he was being told to hate, essentially. Who were what, like immigrants, women? Yeah, women, exactly. And they'd be able to have really productive, interesting conversations.

18:53Marianna Spring:And he suddenly thought, oh, I think maybe what I've been being told is not necessarily the case. But because he was so in this silo in his online world and it was isolating him in real life too. I've been wanting to talk about this publicly for over a year now. And now I've finally worked up the courage to talk about things I've kept quite close to myself. I've started to abandon my old racist and misogynistic views as they no longer made any sense to me in my head. I think it takes a lot of guts to actually say, like, I really got this wrong. I got really pulled into this and it really impacted me.

19:25Marianna Spring:And I'm really sorry. And I want people to better understand how they can be exploited and targeted and kind of used for the sake of some of the influencers who were pushing this stuff, but actually also by the platforms who ultimately benefit from a user like Callum spending a huge amount of time on the platforms consuming this kind of outrage style content. Well, what do the platforms themselves say about the rage baitiness that Callum was experiencing? What are they actually doing about it? So all of the platforms talk about the kinds of measures that they take to protect users, to limit the spread of harmful content.