Meta settles lawsuit over online addiction - but will it make a difference? | Hour 3

Meta. Meta. The parent company of Facebook entered into a settlement agreement in order to avoid the massive payment demands that were being made of it for addicting all sorts of kids to their platforms and pumping them full of all sorts of toxic ideas. And so they're going to agree as part of this big lawsuit that They've agreed to pay up to $ 17 billion over 10 years to settle a lawsuit brought by a coalition of states, alleging the company's social media products, including Facebook and Instagram, violated state laws by creating addictive platforms that put children at risk. Okay, so I know $ 17 billion... Sounds like a large amount of money. $ 17 billion. I mean, that's roughly half of what I take home. And so... So people may think, wow, that's a lot of money. $ 17 billion. Right. Meta has a profit or had a profit. I went and looked it up. Last year's profit was $ 60 billion. Okay? So... 17 into 60, like what is the percentage? That's a little bit less than what? A third of one year's annual profits, but they're going to spread that over a decade. So it's not a lot. If you were to think 60 billion times 10 for a decade, like that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of... I was told there'd be no math here, so hang on. Like $ 600 billion? So out of $ 600 billion, 17 is even a smaller percentage. So this is a good deal for Meta. And they also get to apply pressure to their competitors. That's another detail. It's not getting a lot of attention. Also not getting a lot of attention... some of the harms that social media has helped to promulgate. And you're going to hear some of the harms as we go through the terms of the settlement and the accusations that were made by the attorneys general and such. But think about what is not being listed, right? When I go through this stuff. So the proposed settlement requires META, To pay the money over a 10-year period, California would receive between $ 1. 5 and $ 2. 1 billion if the settlement is approved by the court. How the payments would be used, and this is according to KTLA.com, so this is a California-based, Los Angeles-based TV station. So they're focused on the California payout. I've got the North Carolina one here, too. So the California payments... would be used, how they get used will be decided by the legislature and the governor, but under the proposed settlement, the money is earmarked for preventing or addressing mental health and other harms to young Californians associated with social media use. Slush fund. Sorry. This is not actually going to pay people who were harmed. As far as I can tell. Now, I am one of the, I forget, the class of people. I don't know. I get these postcards or something from a big Facebook lawsuit. I think there was like I got a gift card or something for like $ 17. Because apparently I was a victim of something that Facebook did like 10 years ago. I don't know. Not even sure what it was. I was just included in a class, and I got a payout. It was like $ 17 or something, and it was in a gift card form, and I have to use the gift card on some site to buy some crap that I don't want to buy. And all of it is way more than $ 17. So it's like I can't even use it. So that's how I suspect the actual victims of their practices. I'm assuming you're probably going to get the same treatment, okay? So the settlement includes bans and restrictions on features known to be harmful, okay? So Meta says that they will be implementing all of these changes across their Facebook platform and the Instagram platform, okay? They are going to institute, for example, a default daily time limit of two hours for users under the age of 18. So if you're not 18, Facebook and Instagram are going to limit you for two hours a day. Unless it's lifted by a parent. So that's going to happen, sure. And get this, if other social media platforms agree to similar terms, then the daily time limit will drop to one hour. So Meta is trying to force YouTube, TikTok, I guess Twitter, Snapchat, all of these other platforms that the Utes use, Meta is trying to force them, is trying to incentivize them to agree to these same limits. Because otherwise, they're basically, they're unilaterally disarming. Because what is it that Facebook and Instagram have monetized? Your attention. They want you. That's why they got rid of the scrolling by chronology and you're only going to see stuff. Remember back in the day, okay, I'm dating myself here, but back in my day, Facebook would give you the posts of your friends, quote unquote friends, and once you got, like if you had, say, 100 friends and let's say 20 of them posted today, you would see the 20 posts, and then you would see old posts that you already saw yesterday. And so you would be like, oh, okay, I've exhausted all of the new posts from my friends today, and so I'm done. And then they figured out with the algorithms that they could stuff your feed with posts from people that are not your friends. that were not shared by your friends list. Twitter does this too, by the way, in their following feed. They stuff people in there. I don't follow. That's why I don't use it. I don't use the for you feed. I don't use the following feed. I don't use any of their feeds. I have my own feed. I created my own list of people that I follow when I put them into a list, just like Hitler did. I made a list and I have a list of people and I almost exclusively look at that list. And you can follow that list, by the way. If you follow me on Twitter, you can follow that list without following the individual accounts. You could just like basically follow my list and then you could just bounce over there and look and it's called influence. And there are some people on there. There's some people on there that say a lot of things I disagree with. But I do that because I want to hear what all of the different arguments are. That's why when I get lefties that call the program and they're like, you know, I got an argument for you. It's like, yeah, I've already heard the argument. That's how I know that. It's because I follow people I don't agree with. Anyway, they create these algorithm lists that push content into your feed, and they got rid of the, or they implemented, I should say, sort of the endless scrolling. So you could just keep scrolling, and it's not chronological, right? It'll just go on and on and on and on. It's like Pinterest does this. You never get to the end. So there's never the feeling like, oh, you know, check that box. I've, you know, I've cleared my inbox for today. You never get there. And that has a psychological effect on people. It makes you keep coming back. 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So between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., if you are under the age of 18... You will not be able to get on the app unless your parent lifts it. Now, if other social media platforms agree to similar terms, the nighttime block will expand to cover 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. So we're agreeing to this time frame, but if everybody else agrees, then we'll make it longer. They are implementing default blocks on notifications to users under the age of 18. Same time frame, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. And during the school day, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. And just between August 15th and June 15th. So they're going to be blocking kids from getting the notifications. See, a lot of this is solved by just not letting the kids have the phone. I'm just going to point that out. If you don't have the phone, like I did this like a year ago, we covered this research where simply having the phone next to you made you more distracted. You never look at the phone. Just having it there, your mind, it's like if you're a heroin addict and somebody puts the whole shoot-up kit next to you. Your brain is going to keep focusing on that and not on the task at hand. Another thing that they agreed to, an enhanced mechanism for teens to report potentially harmful content and a requirement that Meta respond to 90% of those reports within six hours. A ban on displaying numbers of likes or reactions to users under the age of 18. So you're not going to see how many people like your post because that's like, that gives you the dopamine hits. Ooh, I said something people like. A ban on cosmetic procedure image filters for users under the age of 18. I'll get to more on that. An option for users under 18 to choose a non-personalized feed that does not use an algorithm to target them with content designed to keep them scrolling. I mean, I feel like I should be allowed to get that too. And a commitment from Meta to maintain, review, and improve existing teen content safety measures. And if you can't trust Meta on this front, I mean, really, who can you trust? They'll also be required to maintain protections including... Maintain, review, and improve existing teen content safety measures and create enhanced parental supervision tools. Institute age assurance measures to detect users under 18 as well as measures to identify and remove children under the age of 13 who aren't supposed to be on there. Hire an independent auditor with broad access to information and resources, regular reporting requirements, and the authority to communicate concerns to state attorneys general. comply with an injunction prohibiting the company from making false, misleading, or deceptive statements about its safety measures. So the lawsuit was originally filed in 2023, alleged that Meta illegally collected and used data from kids under the age of 13 who used its platforms. It also claimed the company designed its features to encourage excessive use. and did so to put users, young users, at risk and then misled families and the public about the safety of Facebook and Instagram. But I know those are pretty serious allegations, but keep in mind here, the state politicians are going to be getting $ 17 billion. I mean, it's a win-win here, right? I mean, yes, they took a bunch of your kids' info. Yes, they addicted them to their screens. Yes, they misled you about what they were doing. But, but... Politicians are going to get some money. I mean, they'll be able to dole them out to their, you know, preferred agencies and nonprofits that are totally going to be helping with the teen mental health issues and such. Win, win, win for everybody. This is being pitched as a really, really, really good thing, right? Now, the state attorney general in North Carolina, Jeff Jackson, the baby Jesus, He has touted North Carolina's cut. Now, remember also people asking, like, who's going to be able to control the funding and all of that? Well, in North Carolina, last year, the General Assembly codified by statute that the General Assembly makes the determination of how the funds get spent. Because prior to last year, any time an attorney general in our state would sue and win some large settlement, the attorney, uh, the attorney general would control the pot of money. And Roy Cooper used that. He, it started with the tobacco settlement, right? Uh, and they created the, uh, golden leaf fund. Um, Cooper tried to do it with the Atlantic coast pipeline, right? Tried to cut a deal, uh, in, uh, with, uh, the companies that were wanting to build the pipeline and said, through this settlement, give me a chunk of the money, and then he would be able to pay it off to his eco-activist base through the nonprofits and such, through green energy initiatives funneled through left-wing environmentalist groups. When the General Assembly saw that, they were like, oh, hell no, you're not doing that. This is not a settlement of litigation. This is a collusive agreement. This is a bribe, basically, that the energy companies got strong-armed into offering to the attorney general so they would allow it to proceed. And when the General Assembly fought that, won in court, then all of a sudden, now it's like, oh, no, no, now we are not interested in approving this. Lo and behold, and Cooper shut it down, killed the Atlantic Coast pipeline because he couldn't get the money for his environmentalist wacko base. They did this with the hog farm settlement. They controlled that money as well. So North Carolina attorneys general, they've been suing industries, getting chunks of money, and then funneling it to their political allies. And the General Assembly shut that down last year. So the money that North Carolina gets will have to be run through the General Assembly, which makes sense because they control the spending in the state. I will jump over now to the text line. see what people are saying. Probably very similar things. How are they going to monitor this? Kathy says at this point, it's easy to make a fake profile. How can they verify ages? John says, every kid knows how to bypass meta age and our restrictions. Kim says, Pete explain how meta will verify the kid is under 18. I could type in any birth date. I got a fake ID from DMV when I was 18 and that was in the late eighties. Um, What's stopping any of these kids from lying about their age, says Jennifer, right? Like, well, this is what Meta is going to have to build and prove, right? Like, I'm not convinced that this is really going to change anything. I'm not. The only way to protect your kids from social media is for them not to be on social media. I don't know any way around that. I really don't. Like, some of the stuff that they're touting here, For example, the time limits. This, according to WRA. Oh, and by the way, I should point out that North Carolina's cut is up to $ 646. 4 million over a decade. That's the max. Okay. Guaranteed minimum 451 million. But if other companies sign on to doing the same things and agree to pay $ 5 billion apiece, then Meta will kick in the extra. So this is the sweetener for other social media companies to adopt these same restrictions and come out of pocket. So that's why you're hearing this range of payouts. but the guaranteed minimum is 451 million for North Carolina. Okay. And the politicians are taking the victory laps because that's what they do. Even though you, you should recall like the, the, the total damages on this lawsuit could have run into the trillions of dollars because like how many, how many people could claim damages? Like literally everybody that's ever used these platforms, right? So it made sense for Meta to agree to a settlement deal. So on the time limits, a two-hour daily time limit that only the parents can shut off, this limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram. So if you spend an hour on Facebook, that means you only get an hour on Instagram. But here's a bit of a loophole. It does not include messaging. So you can still message your friends. And it does not include watching long form content, which is defined as video or audio that lasts at least 22 minutes without being artificially lengthened. So if you wanted to watch a one hour program that was on Facebook or Instagram or something, you want to watch a one hour podcast or something, right? That would not shut off. You'd be able to keep watching that if it's long form. I guess because that doesn't destroy your attention span or something. One of the other things here, Jeff Jackson says, another change would disable beauty filters that could let users change the shape of their face and their body. Meta already has a policy to block young users from using cosmetic surgery filters. Okay. Like, I got to tell you, honestly, like, if you're using these filters and you send me some, you know, picture or whatever, like, I develop a negative opinion of you. I'm sorry. Like, I do. People who use these filters, like, look, I'm a cat. Right? Or... look at the way I would look at age 200 or look at how this is how I would have looked if I was something else, whatever, like these filters to me, I don't get them. I don't, I think they're absurd. So you're, so they're going to ban these things. Any of these, uh, these shape modifying these beauty filters for your face and body for kids. They already have a block in place for young users from using cosmetic surgery filters. Meta will now block teens from using extreme makeup filters. Okay. And Jeff Jackson, our attorney general, said, we want these apps to do a better job of not making young people feel miserable about themselves. Have you noticed what's missing? In all of the discussion, and I've got the attorney general's press release here, and he talks about meta will disable filters that mimic plastic surgery and tell parents when a suspicious person is contacting their teenager. Okay, good. Like, yeah, that should be good. You should not get randos that are coming into your DMs. Meta's internal testing showed when users began following, for example, eating disorder related accounts, Instagram could recommend additional eating disorder related accounts. So we don't want that. We don't want kids to develop eating disorders, right? That's a big, it's a big deal here. They keep talking about it and they have all these stories cited in the press release from the attorney general's office about how Instagram led to two teens eating disorders and how it's toxic for teen girls and eating disorder and self-harm article. What's missing? Is there anything else? Has there been any other social contagion that has spread on social media, particularly among young girls, teenage girls? Anything else, say, in the last, oh, I don't know, just a ballpark decade? Has there been any other social contagion that we have seen take off and explode in the number of people afflicted with a particular thing that they never were identifying as, oh, oh, not a single mention of body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria, not a single mention in any of these articles, in any of the press releases that Nobody's talking about any of that. Why? You're so focused on the eating disorder as a social contagion, which it is, but not this. Not dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. Why not? Are they going to screen for that stuff too? Does that fall under these parameters? Are they going to block that kind of content? They don't say. From the text line Eddie says, uh, listening to you talk about filters on social media to alter appearance for the better. And I realize why vanity is a sin. It allows one to have a false perception of who they are. This false perception makes it impossible to live an honest life. Um, Jonathan in Asheville, long time, no contact, still a fan. Thank you, Jonathan. Um, I urge you to read Abigail Schreier's book, bad therapy. I actually played some of that when it came out. Uh, I played some of her, she did a, uh, several, uh, podcast interviews and I would pull some of the, um, odd. I did pull some of the audio back in the day. Um, in the context of this mental health slush fund that this is swapping one toxin for another, uh, she'd be an outstanding guest on the show. Um, Yeah. Well, I'm not sure what I, I'm not sure I follow what you mean there by the, uh, by swapping out one toxin for another, um, with the slush fund. I mean, well, okay. So let me, let me think this through. So if it's, you're creating all of the money, you've got this fund, it's going into these, you know, quote, mental health professionals. And if they're directing people, right, if they're affirming and they're doing all of that same stuff, then it, Yeah, it preserves a pathway to that dysphoria, dysmorphia. I think that may be what Jonathan's talking about. Now, it's interesting, though, because one of the original stories on this I read, and I never got to it on the show. This was before the trial started. It was a preview piece that NPR did on August 17th. And they point out that the four states that were leading the suit, California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey— they were seeking up to $ 1. 4 trillion in penalties and product changes. And they got $ 17 billion for all the states. And they're like, victory! But one of the things they say in this piece, again, this is NPR. One of the suit's central arguments is that META designed and deployed features to capture young users' attention and prolong their time on social media, including the Like button, the infinite scroll function, and recommendation algorithms that encourage compulsive use. The company financially benefited from this. according to the lawsuit, because Meta makes money from advertising. And the longer the kids stay on the sites, the more effectively that advertising can be targeted to them and the more money Meta stands to make. The lawsuit alleges that Meta prioritized engagement over young users' safety, creating products that disrupted their education and sleep and in the case of the visual filters, were known to promote eating disorders and body dysmorphia. So, we are acknowledging then that this idea that you are not the thing you are, that your brain is telling you that your your body is somehow not the thing it is and doesn't look the way it is, or it should look different or whatever. Like we're acknowledging that everybody knows this to be the case now. Because I remember saying this stuff like, I don't know, six, seven years ago. And this is the kind of stuff that would get you banned from Facebook. This is the stuff that would get you labeled as phobic. Pointing out that, hey, isn't it weird that all of a sudden there's been this massive explosion of in the number of young females identifying as males. And what's really weird is that it happens in clusters, like a whole group, a whole friend group, a peer group, a clique of girls that are all friends, and one starts identifying as a boy, and then all of a sudden all of her other friends start identifying as boys too. That's weird. That is like the chance of that happening naturally, right? Is so remote. It's like when you look at the, um, uh, what was her name? The one that, uh, was up in, uh, Cynthia Nixon from sex in the city, that chick, the redhead, right? I think it's her. And she said something like both of her kids are trans and their kids, friends are trans. Like the probability, the mathematical probability of that is ridiculous, right? That is, that screams environmental influences. But we weren't allowed to say that. We couldn't say that. Surely, no, this is just, you know, that's their sex assigned at birth. Like this whole vocabulary that was constructed by the pushers of this stuff. the pushers of this ideology that, no, no, who are you to determine what somebody identifies as? This is the way they feel in their own brain, and that's what we need to affirm and all of that. Now, all of a sudden, body dysmorphia is what they're acknowledging here is social contagion spread through social media. Surprise, surprise, surprise. I'm not surprised at all. Jeff Jackson in his press release, or sorry, at the WRAL article, they quote him. He says, I have a seven-year-old daughter. One day she's going to be on social media. I don't want that to be a miserable place for her. I don't want her to see these features and develop unrealistic beauty standards. That's plainly harmful for young people. See, so developing an unrealistic beauty standard Because you see beautiful people and you say, oh, that's what beauty is. This is what normal should be. This is what I should strive to be. That's harmful. But seeing people in your peer group saying they are not the gender they are and they're the opposite gender. And seeing them and affirming them, we all have to affirm that. That's not harmful. That has no impact on the person watching. Really? And by the way, I would also point out that Jeff Jackson, the Attorney General, a.k.a. Baby Jesus, do you know how he made a name for himself? Not the Baby Jesus name. His fellow Democrats gave that name to him in the General Assembly. No. This guy... is the TikToker. This guy was putting out videos on TikTok and still does, has a massive following on TikTok. This is why the National Democrats love, love, love them some baby Jesus. They love Jeff Jackson because he really found a way to utilize social media to talk to people and all that. He does the like, I'm going to stare at the camera and I'm going to give you like a two-minute video on something. And he talks in a normal way. He's got sympathetic-looking eyes. Oh, they're so pretty. Like, this guy's entire career is based on social media. And now he's like, I'm a warrior against this stuff. It's just, ugh. Yeah, I don't see this changing much in the world of social media. The only way to protect your kids is to keep them off it. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support. and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to ThePeteCalenderShow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.