Meta and Google found negligent in social media addiction trial

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Self-directed investing, trading, full service wealth management,

automated investing, financial planning,

thematic investing, retirement planning,

few, and 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.

This podcast is sponsored by Pocket Hose.

I gotta tell you, being a homeowner, there's so many things you have to think about all the time.

For example, I have to replace my hoses every single year.

Because they're weak, they get tangled and there's kinks,

then I've found the Pocket Hose Ballistic.

This is the upgrade I've been looking for for a long time, man.

It's reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer used in bulletproof vests.

You know what that means? No kinks, it's not going to get tangled.

It also comes with this Pocket Pivot, which gives you total freedom of movement.

And the spigot has like a 360 degree rotation, which is pretty cool.

There's also this upgraded UV coating they added for free,

so your hose basically looks brand new all the time.

Right now, when you get the new Pocket Hose Ballistic,

you'll get a free 360 degree rotating Pocket Pivot and a free thumb drive nozzle.

Go to PocketHose.com-slashpodcast.

That's PocketHose.com-slashpodcast for your two free gifts with purchase.

PocketHose.com-slash-POD-C-A-S-T

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Janet Jalil, and in the early hours of Thursday,

the 26th of March, these are our main stories.

A young woman wins a landmark social media addiction case against two tech giants

setting a precedent thousands of others could follow.

After Iran rejects negotiations with the US,

President Trump claims its leaders are afraid to admit to talks

because they fear being killed.

Also in this podcast, has anything changed for Venezuelans

since Nicholas Maduro's capture?

January 3rd was a really big step.

It's not enough.

We want the investment of the US,

we want the investment of the international companies,

and we want democracy now.

And just how long have dogs been man's best friend?

You may be surprised by the answer.

It's a landmark case that could transform social media

and open the floodgates for tech giants to be sued

by thousands of young people and their families.

A 20-year-old woman, known as Kaylee,

went to court to argue that two of the world's biggest tech companies,

Meta and Google, designed their apps to be addictive and harmful to adolescents.

And a jury in Los Angeles found them both liable for harming Kaylee's mental health.

She's been awarded a total of six million dollars in damages

over her childhood addiction to social media.

Her lawyer, Mark Lanier, called the ruling a righteous moment.

We've sent a message with this,

that you will be held accountable for the features

that drive addiction.

That's a huge message for these companies.

Mr. Lanier was speaking outside the courthouse,

surrounded by a group of parents

who claim their children were also harmed by social media.

Many of them were seen celebrating and hugging each other after the verdict.

John Dame, whose son Jordan killed himself after being sextorted on Instagram,

is waiting for his own civil case to be heard against Meta.

He welcomed Wednesday's unprecedented ruling.

It's quite interesting, Jordan's four-year death anniversary is today.

So it's a lot of emotions.

It's the right move, it's the right decision.

Really, the only way to affect change on a business in America,

is you can either sue them civilly

or you can press legislation against them,

because the only way that they're going to learn

is either going to be hitting the pocketbooks

or there's going to be some laws that they have to follow, right?

And this is just one little crack in the system

and the floodgates aren't going to start to open, for sure.

And eventually, they're going to start to fall like dominoes.

Google and Meta have said they disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal.

His Meta spokesperson, Ashley Nicole.

Team mental health is profoundly complex

and cannot be linked to a single app.

We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously

as every case is different.

And we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.

Well, this all comes a day after a jury in New Mexico found Meta

liable for the way its platforms endanger children

and expose them to sexually explicit material

and contact with sexual predators.

Let's hear from someone who knows the inner workings of Meta.

Francis Hagen is a former Facebook employee

who became well known as a whistleblower.

Some of the documents that have come out

through these court cases are really good on this like, what went wrong here?

So, for example, one of the studies that they presented in this case

talked about how they knew sending notifications to kids during the school day,

sending notifications to kids late at night,

interfered with their school, the ability to focus in school,

interfered with their sleep.

If you're someone who's struggling with mental health issues,

having trouble sleeping is one of the biggest things that's going to make that worse, right?

They ran experiments where they just did something simple.

They turned off the notifications late at night.

Kids said, I feel less stressed.

I'm able to focus in school.

And yet they didn't launch that because people used the platform overall, one percent less.

What is the value of a healthy child?

What is the value of avoiding struggling with an eating disorder,

struggling with self-arm?

Is it worth one percent less usage?

Those are the kinds of things where, you know,

until you have outside consequences,

the platforms will just brush under the rug,

so they can show their investors positive numbers each quarter.

From a Facebook employee, Frances Hogan,

well, our technology editor, Zoe Climent, says the LA verdict is groundbreaking.

This is a real game-changing moment for social media.

Whatever happens next, and there's likely to be appeals and legal processes to follow,

the long-term impact on these platforms that are used by

billions of people could be really dramatic.

Perhaps we'll see the design features that the jury found made the sites more addictive,

things like auto-scrolling, things like algorithmic recommendations.

Perhaps they'll have to go.

And that would fundamentally make using social media a very different experience,

and a much less appealing one.

And perhaps social media is going to become an over 16s or even an over 18s experience.

We've already had some experts tonight described this as big text,

big tobacco moment, and we know how that worked out.

Might we see health warnings on screens or restrictions on advertising?

I honestly think the verdicts come as a shock to Meta and Google.

They have fought this hard at huge expense.

They've spent $1,000 an hour on legal fees.

The other two companies that were involved in this,

TikTok and Snapchat,

chased a settle before the case even started,

Meta maintains that a single app

cannot be solely responsible for a teen mental health crisis.

But it isn't a shock to the campaigners and the parents who've tirelessly argued

that children are in danger on social media,

and the tech companies aren't doing enough to protect them.

Zoe Klyman, let's turn to the conflict in the Middle East now,

which has been raging for nearly four weeks.

The Iranian regime has dismissed President Trump's claims that they're ready to make a deal,

saying it has no intention of negotiating with the US for now.

Instead, Tehran has set out demands of his own,

including compensation and guarantees that it won't come under attack again.

Iran's former minister Abbas Araqqi said messages may have been conveyed

between the US and Iran by friendly countries like Pakistan and Turkey,

but that didn't amount to dialogue,

and the fact that the US was now talking about negotiations

showed how its position had weakened.

Why are they talking about negotiations?

There are no negotiations to be had,

but the fact of the enemy who is looking for our unconditional surrender

is now seeking negotiations, requesting conversations,

and preparing their highest ranking officials to come and negotiate with the Islamic Republic.

That means accepting defeat.

Despite being constantly rebuffed by Tehran,

the White House insists that it is very close to meeting its goals in Iran.

Speaking at a Republican fundraising event in Washington,

President Trump repeated that negotiations were underway.

And they are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly,

but they're afraid to say it because they figure they'll be killed by their own people.

They're also afraid they'll be killed by us.

A correspondent David Willis told me that the conflicting messaging

and President Trump's handling of the conflict

is causing divisions in the Republican Party to deepen further.

We're starting to see signs of frustration on the part of lawmakers who up to now

have given the Trump administration a pretty wide latitude

in regard to the waging of this war.

Some emerged from classified briefings on Capitol Hill yesterday,

complaining about the lack of detail in regard to such things as

the possible deployment of ground troops.

And concerns have also been expressed about the rising cost of the conflict

and the lack of a timeline.

And indeed, perhaps the most outspoken concern was expressed by a Congresswoman

Nancy Mase of South Carolina.

And she said she left the briefing,

troubled by what she described as shifting explanations

and unclear military objectives.

And she later wrote on social media that the longer

this war continues, the faster it will lose the support of Congress

and the American people, Jeanette.

David Willis, meanwhile, as attacks on Tehran continue,

many Iranians are still trying to flee the country.

Dan Johnson has been reporting from the Iran-Turkey border for several weeks.

From the city of Van, he told us what he'd been hearing from people who'd recently arrived there.

Yeah, more people coming over the border, leaving the country,

while ever the prospects of peace look remote.

And people have said to us that they're confused about exactly what's happening.

The number of different twists and turns that they've been in this conflict so far.

They can't work out for themselves where this is heading

and what they should do to try to keep themselves safe.

Iranians have spoken to have talked about how they feel they can't trust Donald Trump.

How he's not a man of his word.

But they also see that the regime is not going to give in.

He's not going to crumble.

One woman said that she thought the regime would see the country destroyed.

Before it gave in.

So it's difficult for Iranians.

They are trying to keep themselves safe.

Many, of course, are afraid to talk to us openly,

because of the risks that they may face if they return to the country.

But I have spoken to one man who spoke to us openly without fear.

This is Kamal Abassi, who said he didn't want to return to Iran.

He didn't think it was safe to go back there.

Well, ever that regime is in place.

He's been telling me about the protests that he joined,

the impact of the war on his home and his family.

He started off by telling me about participating in those protests at the start of the year.

What I saw was a very harsh and severe repression by the government.

They used direct shooting at the protesters.

They killed and murdered many, many more were arrested.

Waiting harsh sentences like execution, capital punishment,

or long-term imprisonment.

Was it frightening to join those protests?

Very frightening, you have first even think of the possibility of death

when you want to join such a protest in Iran.

If you take part in a protest, it's better to die rather than to be caught.

People honestly expected something better from this United States and Israeli intervention,

but I think it backfired at the moment.

Because Iranian people right now seem to be trapped and caught between war on one hand

and domestic repression on the other hand, like a dilemma.

We thought that the American intervention would release us soon.

However, that freedom which we wanted didn't happen.

Many people, even many civilians, are getting killed because of those bombings.

And this is what happened to your family, right? Tell us that story.

All the windows started shaking and breaking and my father, 82 years old,

was struck badly, he'd taken to hospital and later lost his life,

because of receiving such a shock.

And my house also damaged walls, cracked down.

It was not habitable anymore.

I had to leave it.

Should the conflict continue?

If it ends in a ceasefire, I am much worried about those people who have been arrested

during the protests.

There may be 200,000 people are now in prison waiting to face harsh sentences.

So I don't like my country to suffer more than that,

but on the other hand, I don't like the regime I had told us to survive.

What do you think your future is now?

I try to be optimistic, I try my best to survive,

make a new and bright future, something which I was the pride of in my country.

Living in Iran is a very dark experience.

Now the time in Turkey.

Turkey is not to fully Western countries.

It's a Muslim country like Iran.

But even I see the lives, I see the people and compare them to my own country

and to all my people.

I see and I understand a very huge gap.

And just it's because of those people who have got the upper hand in my country.

I mean, I had told us.

Of course, until now, many people, we have lost many people,

many people have been injured or in jail.

But I think that's the price we are paying

for our freedom.

Still to come in this podcast?

We had a few tells.

There were a loose and we wanted to repair them.

When we took them out, we found the bones.

Could a body found in a Dutch church be that of the French soldier,

Datanyur, who inspired the three musketeers?

It's carnival season and the U.S. Virgin Islands invite you to experience carnival

in St. Thomas, this May.

A non-stop celebration of music, culture, food, and pure Caribbean vibes.

Picture this.

Colorful parade, filling the streets.

Soka and steel pan in the air.

Dancing from day into night and incredible local flavors at every turn.

The energy is contagious.

You don't just watch carnival.

You feel it.

When you're ready to slow it down,

the beauty of the U.S. Virgin Islands is right here waiting

from the stunning beaches of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John

to the warmest hospitality and vibe like no other.

It's the perfect mix of celebration and relaxation.

Here's the best art.

If you're traveling from the U.S., no passport is required.

Just easy travel and no stress.

If you love good food, great music, beautiful beaches,

and unforgettable vibes, especially during carnival,

this is where you need to be.

Start putting your carnival getaway at visit usvi.com.

That's visit usvi.com.

USVI naturally in rhythm.

Momentum doesn't appear overnight.

It's built, refined, repeated.

Puerto Rico understands momentum.

As companies rethink supply chains and reshore operations,

they're choosing a location that already delivers

life-saving medicines, advanced manufacturing,

and global scale innovation.

As a U.S. jurisdiction operating under federal law,

with competitive tax incentives designed for long-term

investment, companies don't just relocate here.

They scale here.

Not culture or business.

Culture and business.

Puerto Rico.

It's not what's next.

It's where.

Visit investpr.org forward slash business.

Ever wonder why we make the choices we do?

And how to make smarter ones?

Introducing Choiceology,

an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

Join Water and Professor Katie Milkman

and award-winning behavioral scientist

and author of the best-selling book How to Change,

as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates,

authors, athletes, and everyday people

about why we do the things we do.

And how to make better choices

to help avoid costly mistakes.

Each episode covers the latest research in behavioral science

and dives into themes like the power of self-control,

shaping your mindset for success,

navigating new beginnings,

and why starting over can feel so hard.

Listen to Choiceology at Schwab.com slash podcast.

Or wherever you listen.

Can healthcare really be reinvented?

And if so, what does that look like in practice?

I'm Teges the Scy, Special Host of Resilient Edge,

a business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte.

In this episode, I talk to leaders reshaping what healthcare can be.

Ratnakar Lavu and Elevants Health are keeping the consumer

at the center of everything they do.

We're really focused on three things.

One is simplified personal member experiences.

And the second thing is we want to empower the providers

to drive the right health outcomes.

The third thing is we want to simplify work for ourselves

so that we can better serve our customers and members.

It's about designing systems that work for the consumer,

systems that listen, learn, and build trust.

We want them to be able to understand their benefits,

find the right care,

and then eventually we want to be able to schedule that.

And this is where we are really excited about the partnership

between Deloitte and AWS to bring some of these experiences to life.

So how do you start, especially if you're dealing with legacy overload?

The full conversation unpacks how Deloitte, AWS, and Elevants Health

are redesigning healthcare from the inside out,

creating systems that work smarter, scale faster,

and bring the human experience back to the forefront.

All of that and more on this special episode of Resilient Edge.

Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is the Global News Podcast.

The former president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro,

will appear in court today in New York to face drug trafficking and weapons charges.

It will be his second court appearance since US Special Forces seized him at the start of the year.

In the past three months, Venezuela's government once hostile to Washington has begun working

with it, opening its oil and mining sectors to foreign investment and releasing some political

prisoners. But beyond the political shifts, what's actually changed for Venezuelans?

Here's our South America correspondent, Ioni Wells.

The article of Sookre, one of Venezuela's poorest states,

is where the US military action against Venezuela started.

These strikes on small alleged drug smuggling boats now responsible for killing more than 150 people

started months before the US Special Forces raid on Caracas in the seizure of Nicolas Maduro.

Now with Maduro appearing in court in New York, the US and Venezuela say change is coming,

but here in Sookre, does anyone believe it?

Here in the coastal town of Wittier, many families tell me their relatives were killed in the

boat strikes. One morning, I got up as usual thinking he was fishing. I found out that news on

social media. Dianis Noriega, a mother of five, tells me her husband Luis was one of them.

It's cool the kids were telling my daughter that her dead was bone up on a boat, she fell into

depression. The US claimed those on board were narco terrorists but hasn't yet offered evidence.

Dianis tells a different story, poverty pushing ordinary fishermen to take these jobs.

Poverty, she says, that military action can't bomb away.

Since Maduro's arrest, there are already some tangible changes in the nation's capital,

Caracas, like the release of some political prisoners. Hezuz Armas, who worked on the

opposition's last election campaign, was detained for 10 months before his release in February.

They torture me, they use plastic bags and put these plastic bags all over my face in January

3rd was a really big step. It's not enough. We want the investment of the US, we want the investment

of the international companies and we want democracy now.

Here on the coast, jobs are scarce and shortages are common.

Cues of cars stretch from miles in the capital, culminate waiting for fuel and people have had

no water for two weeks, not even for flushing the toilet. In the fishing town of Waka,

the first delivery of cooking gas since December has just arrived.

In the world's most oil-rich nation, this fisherman Pablo Marín can barely afford fuel.

Average salaries are less than $200 a month, and yearly inflation of nearly 500% last year

makes his earnings in Venezuela's currency worthless.

10 years ago, money had value. Now you're paid in cash and it's worth nothing.

In another country, in Ecuador, a family could make $500, catching 100 kilograms of fish,

pay for fuel and still have enough left over for food. Here, if you catch 100 kilograms of fish,

you would have to find another 100 to cover your expenses, so you're left with nothing.

Just off the coast here, the oil company Shell has signed deals with the US and

Venezuela governments for a huge new gas project since Maduro's arrest.

Jamari Martinez, a resident from a local family of fishermen,

has hopes the local area will benefit. It's unclear whether these offshore projects will employ

local workers all lead to investment on shore. We're hoping for a new change, a new improvement,

new projects, and that new opportunities will be offered to the fishermen, to the Venezuelan people,

has a whole. This part of Venezuela in South Korea feels miles away from the political bubble

of Caracas with all the talkers, new mining and oil deals there. Poverty, the economic crisis,

destitution are all very embedded in this part of the country, and even with the talk of new

foreign investments, quite literally on the horizon here, the prospect of real change for people

still feels very distant. My only wealth reporting. The head of Canada's national airline,

Air Canada, is facing calls to resign after issuing a condolence message only in English

and not in French following a crash at a major US airport that killed two pilots,

Carla Conti reports. On Sunday night, as an Air Canada plane was landing, a New York's La Guardia

traveling a more than 200 kilometers an hour, a fire truck crossed at an intersection on the runway.

The plane hid the truck. Both pilots were killed. While some of the passengers and crew were injured,

they all survived. Tributes have poured in for the two men, McKenzie Gunther and Anton Forest.

Shortly after the accident, Air Canada's Michael Russo released a video of condolence on X,

but only in one of Canada's two official languages, English,

despite the fact that one of the two men who died, Anton Forest, was from French speaking Quebec.

First and most importantly, I want to express our deepest sorrow for every one affected.

Our efforts are focused on the needs of our passengers and crew members,

along with their families and loved ones. This has outraged many in a country where more than

one in five people speak French. Canada's Parliamentary Committee on Official Languages

summoned the airline boss to explain himself before MPs. In the Prime Minister Mark Carney

as waited into the row, saying Mr. Russo's response showed a lack of compassion

and calling on him to step down. Companies like Air Canada particularly have a responsibility

to always communicate in both official languages regardless of the situation. I'm very disappointed

as others are in this unilingual message of the CEO of Air Canada. It doesn't matter

to the certain extent, but particularly in these circumstances. A lack of judgment, a lack of compassion.

Mr. Russo lives in Montreal, but despite his name is an Anglophone. It's not the first time he's

been criticized for his lack of French. When he was appointed a CEO of Air Canada in 2021,

a journalist asked him why he hadn't learned the language, despite living in Quebec for more

than a decade. His response, that he didn't have the time, sparked outrage. He later apologised

and promised to learn French. Mr. Russo as until the 1st of May to appear before the committee.

Amid concerns that safety failures may have been to blame for the accident, the row has sparked a

fresh debate about linguistic inclusivity in Canada.

Water drips from the rocky icicles hanging above the winding chambers of

Goff's cave. Here a sliver of jawbone has reshaped the story of where the first dogs came from

and how their fate became entwined with ours. We had stone age hunter-gatherers and their dogs

living and everything that's kept. I'm walking through the meandering tunnels with Dr.

Lockie Skarsbrook from Oxford University, one of the scientists behind the discovery.

This is a very long standing relationship between humans and dogs and has been pushed back

for 5,000 years earlier than we thought before. It's been pushed back because of a genetic analysis

of a jawbone, long thought have come from a wolf but now shown to be one of the first dogs

living closely with humans here 15,000 years ago. Dr. Skarsbrook thinks it's a significant finding.

Not only is this earlier than we thought for dogs, it's 6,000 years earlier than

Kettle pegs sheep. All of these other domestic cats only entered our homes 2,000 years ago.

The Goff's cave finding prompted the research team to analyse other bones in museum collections

across Western Europe. The results showed that these ancient dogs were not only genetically similar

to the jawbone found in Goff's cave, chemical tests showed they ate the same food as their masters.

A finding that indicates that the dogs travelled with their human owners across Europe to Britain

from Turkey. Taken together, the finding showed that the friendship between dogs and humans runs

deeper than we thought and was there almost from the very start.

Palab Gosh. Now to another historic discovery. You may think that D'Artagnol is just a fictional

character in the three musketeers, Alexander Dumas' tale of dashing French soldiers in the

quarter of Louis XIV. But there was a real life d'Artagnol who was the inspiration for the

hero of the novel that has entranced generations of readers and spawned dozens of movies and tv

shows. For more than 350 years his final resting place has remained a mystery. Now archaeologists

who have spent decades searching for his grave think that they found it under the collapsed

floor of a church in the Netherlands, Chantal Hartle has a story.

The story of the swashbuckling French soldier D'Artagnol has told in one of the many stage

adaptations of the three musketeers. D'Artagnol whose real name was Charles de Bates de Castelmore

was the right-hand man to France's most flamboyant king, Louis XIV, trusted with matters of

espionage, secret missions and personal protection. He died in battle in 1673 during the French

siege of Maustricht in the Netherlands. His body was rumored to have been buried in a church

in the Dutch city, but there was no record of a burial in the church archives and no evidence

had emerged until last month when part of the church floor collapsed revealing a skeleton.

The decan Joss Valk called an archaeologist and says there was a moment of silence when they

saw the first bone properly. We had a few tells that we were loose and we wanted to repair them.

When we took them out we found a wall in the ground so that was interesting and we cleaned

all a bit and then we found bones. Valk says he is 99% certain that these are the remains of D'Artagnol.

Not only were bones found under the floor but a musket bullet at chess level and a French coin

from 1660. And he says the location of the grave right beneath where the altar used to be

is also significant as only royalty or other important figures would have been buried there

at the time. The archaeologist who took part in the excavation is more cautious.

Wim Dijkman is waiting for final confirmation of the skeleton's identity before getting his hopes up.

A DNA sample taken from the jawbone is currently being analysed to see if it matches that

of D'Artagnol's descendants. If the tests come back positive Dijkman said this will be the

highlight of his career, having spent almost 30 years trying to find the legendary musketeers grave.

And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch you can email us globalpodcast at

bbc.co.uk. This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Russell Newlove, the producer

of a shiver-only, the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Janette Gillil, until next time, goodbye.

What a deal! Your new morning groove, ice coffee from McDonald's, any size for just 99 cents to

11 a.m. Pricing participation may vary, cannot be combined with any other offer.