META Faces 'Hundred of Billions' in Fines: Significance of Child Safety Trial

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
And for more on the trial and the potential implications, we are joined by James Czerniawski, Head of Emerging Tech at the Consumer Choice Center. James, I'm sure you already know how excited I've been to talk to you about this one. You know I love some good legal drama.
What is the strongest case that the states are making against Meta? Because there are several accusations enclosed within this single lawsuit.

**James Czerniawski** (0:23)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Marley. I think that when we're looking at it, overarching, it is focused on these design features that they have, whether that's infinite scroll or autoplay.
They've also talked about obviously the presence of underage kids under the age of 13 being on these platforms prevalently even though obviously that is not supposed to be happening underneath existing law. Currently, if you're under 13 years old, you're not supposed to have Facebook accounts or any kind of social media accounts right now. But yeah, we've seen reporting of kids as young as eight being able to go and circumvent those limited controls that are out there right now to go and get access to those accounts. So they argue that basically by having features like autoplay, by having infinite scroll, that this is basically hooking kids into staying on their platforms longer than they might otherwise should, and that's the crux of it. They think that this is causing irreparable harm to our children and therefore, these companies must be held accountable because they have not done enough. Really, the other part of this argument too is that they're leaning into, I would say, some of the revelations from Frances Hogan's era when she was at the company, and then left to go and say that basically, they knew that there was negative mental health consequences of social media, and that they still went and chose to basically prioritize their product over children.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:37)
Yeah, I saw some of that in the opening statements that they brought that back up, saying they knew it, they hid it, they denied it. But Meta is expected to argue that these features are how users discover and consume content, likely going to invoke First Amendment rights here, that they can't infringe on the speech that is a part of the content. Content and speech usually go hand in hand in these cases. How strong do you think that defense is here, James?

**James Czerniawski** (2:04)
I mean, in my opinion, I think it's very strong, because at the end of the day, if we're looking at infinite scroll and autoplay, those features in of themselves are not addictive, because if we were just going to go and take it and autoplay, paint drying on wall or infinite scrolling, it's like you're always getting paint drying on wall, no matter how far you scroll, those features would not be popular. But it's because those features are going in connecting users with other users' content, their speech, talking about whatever things they care about. That is a direct implication of the government then here, potentially trying to go and dictate how a company is conveying speech to users, and that is going to raise significant First Amendment considerations. Then when you're looking at the types of content that states have taken issue with over the years, whether it's been eating disorder content, suicidal ideation, mental health, more broadly speaking, at the end of the day, those are still protected topics underneath the First Amendment of the Constitution, number one. Number two, the company, you can also almost assuredly expect them to go and invoke Section 230 because it is not the company's speech in of itself when talking about any of these topics. Therefore, they're going to say, hey, we understand your concerns here, but that's not our speech here. This is something that somebody else is saying and we're just basically intermediary here. We're hosting and allowing anybody to go in and basically say what they want on our platform, largely speaking. Therefore, we should not be found liable for what other people are basically going and spreading.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
The big argument from the states is that it has damaging mental health effects for these users, these children that are using it. But you say there's some murkiness around the data that they're using in terms of this evidence that it's damaging or how damaging it is. Walk me through that.

**James Czerniawski** (3:45)
Yeah, I think ultimately when it comes down to looking at the data around the kids and mental health and social media, the ultimate issue here is that when we talked about it, they basically treated it as a monolithic kind of issue where they're looking at social media and blaming it as the be-all end-all of mental health issues. Whereas there are litany of reasons that can go and explain why kids are feeling the way that they are. Noticeably, we were having a period of low mental health issues on the report there, we could just be reverting back to the mean. You could also go and look at the fact that there is no actual causal studies that are out there that go and say that social media is resulting in mental health outcomes. There are a whole host of different things that are going on socioeconomically and culturally that are putting pressures on kids that were not there even 20, 30, 40 years ago that are very present right now. I think that on top of that too, while you have plenty of studies that might go and say that there might be some positive correlation things between social media and mental health, there are also other studies that go and show that kids are benefiting from having access to that technology because it's giving them a sense of connection and community that they didn't otherwise have. If I think about myself, I grew up where I didn't quite fit into one subset of group of people, if you will, in my offline world. But in the online world, you could go and find one thing, let's say, and you found a community of people that share that singular thing with you, that allows you to form connections and get a community with people that you otherwise did not have previously.