Meta cares about kids now?!

0:00Meta, better known as Facebook and Instagram and even WhatsApp, doesn't have the best track record when it comes to taking care of the kids. There's a whole movie coming out about it. It's called The Social Reckoning. Facebook wants you to stay on the site for as long as possible. And two years ago, the algorithm was changed. What the movie lacks in looking good, it makes up for in dramatizing one of the biggest issues of our time. We have 102 hours to get everything. evidence of drug cartels and a study that hasn't been made public on Instagram and teen mental health. Teen mental health. In the movie, but also in real life, a whistleblower leaks a report saying Instagram knowingly made social media addictive for teens and that addiction led to a raft of mental health issues, suicidal ideation, lawsuits, and now Meta is settling.

0:49They're giving states a ton of money and introducing a bunch of restrictions to keep kids safe. And on today, explain from box. We're going to ask if they're going to work.

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1:30Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Pablo Torre about his New York City upbringing, striking fear into the hearts of sports teams and blazing his own trail in sports media. Pablo also flips the script on me and gets me to answer a very spicy question. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Lauren Feiner and I'm a senior policy reporter with The Verge. And Lauren, what did Meta just agree to? Because people are saying it's a big deal.

2:08Yeah. So there's two parts of what Meta agreed to. First is the money. They agreed to pay about$17.1 billion to the states over 10 years, but$5 billion of that will only kick in if YouTube and TikTok agree to similar terms and their own payment to the states. This is the most accountability that social media has ever faced. We're making meta pay. I think they are admitting fault by the settlement of this agreement. They're also showing that they did wrong. So that's the money side of things. And then you have the actual business changes that they agreed to. So they agreed to things including a two-hour usage limit across its apps daily.

2:56There are not going to be notifications and alerts keeping kids up at night. There are not going to be notifications and alerts distracting kids at school. It changed nighttime and school hour notifications for teens. So those are off by default. An end to displaying the number of likes on a teens post. A ban on plastic surgery filters. Enhanced detection and removal of kids under 13 from these platforms. And it's also going to let teens turn off their personalized algorithm in their feed and get a reverse cron feed that, in theory, the states might believe is less addictive. Meta has essentially surrendered.

3:42OK, let's break it down a little bit and just start with the money. Which states are getting billions of dollars? All of them? Most of them? DC is one of them, even though it's not a state, I heard. Yeah, nearly every state is getting in on this money. It's 47 states and D.C. and U.S. territory. So it's really almost the entire country that's getting in on the action. One of the states that is not a part of this deal is New Mexico, which, as you might remember, recently got its own deal. So, yeah, this is really across the country. Every state is kind of getting in on this. And can you give us a sense of how meaningful$17,$18 billion is to MetaMark and the gang?

4:26Yeah. So, you know, obviously, as we know, Meta is a, you know,$1.4-ish trillion company. So this is not a huge sum of money in the grand scheme of things for Meta, especially over the course of 10 years. That said, it's not completely insignificant, and especially at this time when having cash flow is really important to companies like Meta that are involved in the AI race. But, like, did their stock price go up or down on the news? It did go up on the news. So, yeah, so shareholders clearly saw this as a net positive of, you know, at least there's some more stability here, and this is not something that's going to take down Meta as a business.

5:08And part of the deal, as you mentioned, is that Meta is going to hold up some of the settlement until other companies like YouTube, TikTok, Snap follow its lead here. What is that about? Have we ever seen something quite like that before? Yeah, that was a really interesting part of the settlement. I've never really seen anything quite like that before. You know, a settlement in general is something that can only be enforced between the parties. And in this case, it's just Meta and the states. who are signing onto this agreement, TikTok and YouTube had nothing to do with this really, but yet they're being roped in here.

5:45And I see that as a little bit of a power move on Meta's part, because on the one hand, if they're the only ones who are having to enforce this usage limit across their apps, well, you know, a teenager who is, you know, finally hit their Instagram limit for the day might just go and spend some time on YouTube and TikTok, and they might spend much more time there because they can't get kicked off. So I think it is to Meta's benefit to rope them in here. And by arranging this settlement like this, now Meta is almost incentivizing the state AGs to go even harder after its competitors. And does that feel like it's going to work?

6:29Do you think this gamble on Meta's part might pay off? Do we have any idea? I think there's a few signals in both directions. I think there are some pretty strong signals of why YouTube and TikTok might take a deal like this. One is that they could come to a similar calculation that Meta did, that taking a settlement like this, agreeing to some discrete terms of how they should change their apps is actually for the better for them in the long run. The alternative, for example, might be legislation that is much more ambiguous or confusing for how they should comply with it. One example of that is the Kids Online Safety Act, or COSA, which is a very popular bill in Congress.

7:17Now, there's a reason big tech has fought us over the last five years trying to keep this bill from passing, and it's because they put profit over our children's safety. Moms are coming forward and saying big tech is aggravating and exacerbating, in fact, profiting from driving toxic content at kids, eating disorders, bullying, sexual harassment, substance abuse. That would impose a duty of care onto social media companies, which means that they would have to take on this responsibility to protect kids in the way that they design their platforms. And that's a lot more difficult for them to figure out how to comply with or worry about who's going to enforce that in the future in whatever administration we're in than agreeing to some discrete terms of what exactly they're going to change to their apps.

8:14So I think that's one reason they might choose to just follow through on a deal like this. On the other hand, they could say, you know what, we're really different from Meta. Our businesses are different. You know, the reason people come to TikTok or YouTube might be different from the reasons they come to Instagram and Facebook. YouTube in particular, I think would make an argument about being a place that people learn things. They come to for the longer form videos and it's more of an entertainment app. I think that's kind of language we've seen from them before. So I think we could see them take an argument like that a little bit further.

8:56I'm glad you brought up Congress because Congress infamously refuses to regulate social media, though they certainly humor the idea every now and then. Does Meta's settlement become some kind of de facto national policy now that it's sort of, you know, I guess broaching the issue before Congress manages to pass legislation? I think it's quite possible that it does. I think we have seen COSA get fairly far in the last Congress and in this Congress, but it's also become more complicated. The House and the Senate have different versions of the bill right now. So that means even if it passes in either chamber, they're still going to have to reconcile the two and they're worlds apart.

9:41So I think this is very likely going to be the major document that we have that's changing social media regulation, social media norms for the foreseeable future. And remind us what might be dangerous about trusting Meta to self-regulate. The fact that Meta agreed to these terms, I think we can intuit that they believe this is something they can live with, that this isn't going to be, you know, a death knell for their business. They're going to be able to weather the storm. So I think, you know, you have to keep that in mind of like who is coming up with these terms. And of course, the state AG has played a significant role here.

10:25And I think they seem very happy with the settlement. But you have to keep in mind that this is not exactly the same as a court order or regulation, and it's applying to one company and its terms that it felt it could live with. And if we're not going to be cynical for a second here and Meta actually convinces Snap and YouTube and TikTok to go along with them and all four massive titans essentially adopt the same regulations for miners' usage of their platforms, do we have a better society? I think it depends on how this is all implemented. You know, we have, first of all, the potential privacy issues with age verification that many people have raised already.

11:17And then you have the questions of how easy is all of this to just circumvent? And how much do these defaults really do to change teens' behaviors?

11:30So I think, you know, it's certainly possible that these all have really long lasting effects and that, you know, enough kids will not circumvent the protections and they will just take the defaults and it'll change just how teens interact with social media in general. But I think we really do have to see how this all plays out. And if, you know, it lives up to the hopes that a lot of the AGs here really want it to. And how long do we have to wait? Years? Years? Some of the provisions take effect relatively soon. But yeah, there are certain benchmarks within the next year or two years for certain standards that Meta has to reach in implementing these.

12:15OK, well, we'll have you back in years to find out how it went. Can't wait.

12:29OK, remember a minute ago when Lauren said, You know, we have, first of all, the potential privacy issues with age verification that many people have raised already. We're going to raise those issues next on Today Explained.

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16:03A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? Today, explain. Billion dollars. My name is Paresh DeVay. I'm a senior writer at Wire covering big tech companies, including Meta. Okay, great. And we just spoke to Lauren at The Verge about all of these new policies that Meta is going to institute to protect kids from the terrors of social media. But they're all kind of built upon, perhaps obviously, knowing how old a given user is. How does Meta know how old a given user is? Well, first is the obvious. When we go and sign up for one of these accounts on Instagram or Facebook, you enter in a birthday.

16:49And so the first thing Meta is relying on is what users say, which, as we all know, it's very easy to fudge what year you're born in. I put in a fake birthday on tons of services that I signed up for. I hear that's very popular on dating apps. That's not a great place to do it, maybe, if you want to land a long-term relationship. But, you know, neither here nor there. The second is trying to use signals to guesstimate a user's age. So if you're logging in at certain times of day, if you are talking to certain accounts, and those people are of a certain age and Meta has reliable assurance that those people are a certain age, it can kind of triangulate all these signals to guess that you might be a teenager if you're not using it, you know, mostly during the school day.

17:37Another option, if Meta believes or suspects you're a teenager and you want to prove that you are actually an adult, you can upload a photo ID or you can take a video selfie. And again, that's where AI comes into play, where AI kind of estimates a user's age based off of that video selfie. And the photo ID could be faked, but at least it gives a level of assurance more than you just selecting a random birth year. So it sounds sort of like an imprecise science. Is that fair? Correct. It's still very messy. One of the things that you hear from the tech industry is because there are all these new laws, settlements, regulations coming into play that touch on age verification, the technology will naturally improve because there's a lot more investment.

18:27The industry that provides some of these age assurance technologies insists that even in just the last few years, the technology has improved because we're using it also for identity verification now, for things like logging into public services. You saw because of all the fraud that was happening during the pandemic. You know, a lot of investment identity verification services that have significantly improved. And so maybe the same happens with age verification. Okay, so the tech side of this is saying we've gotten better at this. Is it true? Have they gotten better at it? Do we know? Do we have receipts?

19:01Well, that's one of the things that the settlement will provide for, that there will be independent auditing of the technologies that Meta adopts for age assurance, and they will be held to certain quality standards The settlement variously requires false positives of no more than 5%, 10%. And Meta has to make sure that the technologies it is using or adopting, buying, building adhere to those. And that is significant because one of the big criticisms of this settlement is that there is not enough situations or provisions where Meta is held to quantifiable standards. Well, this is one of them when it comes to age assurance.

19:44Huh. So has anyone else tried this? As we established with Lauren, like the United States is not exactly leading the pack in terms of tech regulation. But I wonder if there's another country, continent out there that has these protections in place and is better determined than we have whether or not they actually work. The big one on everyone's minds that is comparable to the US is Australia, which in December enacted a ban on teenage use of social media under 16. This is about letting kids be kids. It's also about empowering parents to be able to have those discussions with their children. We want children to have their childhood and we want parents to have peace of mind.

20:29So this reform will not just change a law, it will change a generation. And therefore, social media platforms have had to enact, you know, these sort of same measures that Meta is now discussing to make sure that people under 16 years old are not using their platforms. It's not working so well, I think, is the takeaway so far. So the issue is that, or maybe it's not an issue depending on how you look at it, is that the law in Australia wasn't super prescriptive. It didn't say you have to use this specific technology or your technology has to be this good and the platforms also aren't held to the most significant fines and therefore it's been kind of messy.

21:15My friends would just go, hey dad can you scan your face on this thing? And they'll be like, yeah sure we'll do the thing or whatever. I squinted up my eyes and face, looked at the camera, covered up my teeth, and it worked. Just let me through. There's genuinely like a million ways to circumvent the ban. Initial reports suggest that, yes, there was a wave of like account cancellations and account deletions. And yes, there have been some, you know, teens who have rightfully stopped using these platforms. Parents feel more comfortable telling their kids that they're not allowed to use it because it's illegal.

21:51But there are still plenty of teens on these platforms. You know, the usage of TikTok has barely dipped. Usage of YouTube has barely dipped. Ever since the social media bin, I have not been asked for age verification at all. And I'm still using those apps to this day. A lot of my friends still have it, and it didn't really work. And one of the arguments is that there's also an exemption for public content. So if content is public on these platforms, well, then the teens can access it. And Australia's regulators are right now asking for more investigatory powers, more fining powers, so that they can really crack down on this and force the companies to do better.

22:31I remember being a teenager and trying to do things that I wasn't allowed to do. And what I remember is we always found a way. How are the kids these days getting around age verification on social media? Yeah. I mean, I think it's determination. It's not that difficult, for example, in the setup that Meta provides, where you can unlock certain features in teen accounts when you link a parent to your account, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a parent. It could be an older sibling. It could be another caregiver, someone else who is over 18 that is willing to... It could be a guy on the street corner, right?

23:08Well, potentially, right? And one of the things that the AGs talked specifically about in the settlement hearing last week is that they've asked Meta to make sure that there aren't like parent mills that pop up where kids go to find a quote unquote parent, be their guardian on Instagram to allow them to access more features and get around certain time limits. So, yeah, I mean, with determination, teens are finding a way and, you know, the tools can only keep up so much. So that is one bucket of concerns there, that these tools are imprecise and that kids are going to find a way around them and there's going to be a lot of leakage, let's say.

23:49Another host of concerns are built around privacy, right? Could you tell us about the issues there? Not just privacy, but also free expression. It is increasingly becoming the case that you cannot browse the web anonymously. You have to enter a valid email address to read the news often. You have to upload your ID to access increasingly number of websites, including pornography websites in certain states. So there's that, the privacy side. And there's also been arguments that we are hampering free expression, including of children, by forcing them into these schemes where they cannot access certain content or they can't post certain content because they must verify their age to do so.

24:31or that they are completely blocked from accessing certain services. Now, I'm guessing most of the parents at the parent mill aren't worried about their kids being able to access pornography or certainly post anything of that nature. What are the free speech issues that parents might be concerned about? Well, it's not necessarily parents, but sometimes the kids themselves. So you could imagine a kid living in a situation where their parents do not support their sexuality choices. Those kids look for community online. You know, from a free expression standpoint, that is something that activists have really zeroed in on, that these age verification technologies, these restrictions, these bans on social media can really hamper the ability of those teenagers and lead them to the same sort of issues, whether it be self-harm or other, you know, mental challenges, psychological challenges.

25:28will lead them in that same direction that we're trying to prevent by putting these bans and limitations in the first place. Is there a better way about this? I mean, obviously a conversation is going to start right now between Meta and YouTube and Snap and TikTok, or maybe it already has, but they're going to come in here and say, we are going to participate, we're not going to participate. Do you think they may say, actually, we came up with a better way? It seems hard to fathom that, But that may be one argument that they make. You could give them the benefit of the doubt that, yes, if all the platforms are forced to have some baseline protections in place, that ultimately leads to incentives to allow those to be in place and create sort of this baseline OK experience that people can have with reasonable safeguards in place.