Meta cares about kids now?!

0:00Metta, 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 stretched. 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, Metta is settling. They're giving states a ton of money and introducing a bunch of restrictions to keep kids safe. And on today's explain from box, we're going to ask if they're going to work. Do you hear that? That's how it works.

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2:05You are listening to today explained. I'm Lauren Finner and I'm a senior policy reporter with the verge. And Lauren, what did Metta just agree to because people are saying it's a big deal. Yeah, so there's two parts of what Metta 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 agreed a similar terms and their own payment to the states. This is the most accountability that social media has ever faced. We're making Metta pay. I think they are a meeting fault by the settlement of this agreement that 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.

3:09They're not going to be notifications and alerts keeping kids up at night. They're 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. And end to displaying the number of likes on 18s 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 the personalized algorithm in their feed and get a reverse-crown feed that in theory the states might believe is less addictive. Metta has essentially surrenders. Okay, 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 DCs 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 DC and US territory.

4:16So 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 dollars is to Meta Mark in the gang? Yeah, so obviously as we know, Metta is a 1.4 trillion dollar company. So this is not a huge sum of money in the grand scheme of things for Metta, 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 Metta 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 it's yeah, so shareholders clearly saw this as a net positive of, you know, at least there's some more stability here.

5:18And this is not something that's going to take down Metta as a business. And part of the deal, as you mentioned, is that Metta 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 Metta and the States who are signing on to this agreement. TikTok and YouTube had nothing to do with this really, but yet they're being roped in here. And I see that as a little bit of a power move on Metta'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.

6:23So I think it is too meta's benefit to rope them in here. And by arranging this settlement like this, now Metta is almost incentivizing the state AGs to go even harder after its competitors. And does that feel like it's going to work? Do you think this gamble on Metta'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 Metta 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.

7:24One example of that is the kids online safety actor, Kosa, which is a very popular bill in Congress. Now, 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 and whatever administration were in, then agreeing to some discrete terms of what exactly they're going to change to their apps.

8:27So 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 that. 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. I'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 met a 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.

9:32I think it's quite possible that it does. I think we have seen Kosa 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 and either chamber, they're still going to have to reconcile the two and their worlds apart. So 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 into it 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 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.

10:34And of course the state AG is played a significant role here. And 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 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. And 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.

11:40So I think, you know, it's certainly possible that these all have really long lasting facts 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 and implementing these. Okay, well, we'll have you back in years to find out how it went. Can't wait.

12:42Okay, 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's explained. Support the show comes from, quote, fall is the season everyone gets busier, more calls, more customers, more chances for something to slip through the cracks and staying ahead means working with the right system. Not just working harder. That's why today's episode is brought to you by quote spelled Q U O the business phone system built so you never miss a call with quote all your calls, texts and voicemails living one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast. Oh, and here comes AI. Quo's AI can automatically log calls generate summaries and flag next steps and nothing falls through the cracks.

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17:08very easy to fudge what year you're born in I put in a fake birthday on tons of services that I sign up for I hear that's very popular a day to get 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 a certain age and meta as reliable assurance that those people are certain age it can kind of try and delete all these signals to guess that you might be a teenager if you're not using it you know mostly during the school day another option if meta believes or suspects your teenager or you're not going to be a good guy. Another option if meta believes or suspects your 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 random birth here.

18:18So 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 the industry that provide some of these age assurance technologies insist 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 to public services we saw because of the 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 well that's one of the things that the settlement will provide for that. So we've got to be able to do that for that there will be independent auditing of the technologies that meta adopts for ages assurance and they will be held to certain quality standards the settlement various requires false positives of no more than 5 10%

19:33that has to make sure that the technologies that is using or adopting buying building adhere to those and that is you know 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. 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. So the big one on everyone's minds that is comparable to the US Australia which in December enacted a ban on teenage you know 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.

20:37We want children to have their childhood and we want parents to have peace of mind. So 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 you know the most significant fines and therefore it's been kind of messy. My friends will just go hey dad can you scan your face with this thing and they'll be like yeah sure or 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.

21:41There's genuinely like a million ways to so prevent 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 but there are still many of teens on these platforms. You know the usage of TikTok is barely depth usage of YouTube is barely depth. Ever since the social media ban I have not been asked for age verification at all and I'm still using those apps till this day. My friends still haven't 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 or more finding powers so that they can really crack down on this and force the companies to do better.

22:43I 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? 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 and teen accounts when you link a parent to your account but doesn't necessarily have to be a parent it could be an older sibling it could be another caregiver someone else who was over 18 that is well it could be a guy on the street corner right. Well potentially right and one of the things that the AG's talks 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 on Instagram to allow them to access more features and get around certain time limits.

23:44So yeah I mean with determination teens are finding away 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 another 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 or that they are completely blocked from accessing certain services.

24:48Now 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 from a free expression standpoint that is something that activists have really zeroed in on that these age verification technologies, these restrictions, these bands 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 mental challenges, psychological challenges. They lead them in that same direction that we're trying to prevent by putting these bands 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.

26:02Do 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 okay experience that people can have with reasonable safeguards in place. And then two this element we do know provides for independent monitoring is that enough of a kind of stick you know can that monitoring team continue to provide oversight kind of sit on meta shoulder be the angel of good intentions devil of bad intentions can it kind of keep nudging meta towards being on course and not trying to deviate from these protections possibly so that may be the best solution we have at this point.

27:23If someone on social media say something like meta should do restrictions for parents next and I was like yeah that hits. I've got a text the summer might be almost over but a new bombshell is entered the villa meet the voices of deep ground flux TTS I'm true low key casual I'm a Lexus an upbeat morning person I'm Haley. I'm Haley always cheerful flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak you can interrupt polls and keep talking without losing the plot. Bansy a chat come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking terms apply. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project one after accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other.

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