Meta 'hid the truth' over child safety, US court hears

**Janet Jaleel** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jaleel, and in the early hours of Wednesday 19 August, these are our main stories. At the start of a landmark trial in California, Meta denies deliberately designing platforms like Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children. The Trump administration intensifies pressure on the International Criminal Court by imposing more sanctions on top officials. With the Ebola outbreak in Congo now one of the deadliest ever, the World Health Organization says it's still far from being under control.
Also in this podcast, an Australian woman who killed three relatives by feeding them a meal laced with poisonous mushrooms begins an appeal against her murder conviction.

**Richard Lang** (0:51)
And in the mouse, we actually showed that the crucial wavelength of light for preventing myopia was actually in the UVA, ultraviolet A-band. And in the tree shrew, we showed it went the other direction.

**Janet Jaleel** (1:03)
We hear how tree shrews could be a big help to short-sighted humans.
We begin with a trial that could transform some of the most popular social media apps on the planet. A group of 29 US states is suing the tech giant, Meta, seeking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties. The four lead states in the trial, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accuse the company of harming children by designing Facebook and Instagram to be as addictive as cigarettes. The states argue Meta has fueled a national youth mental health crisis, causing depression, anxiety and even suicide, and that it's deceived users by promoting its apps as safe. California's Attorney General is Rob Bonta.

**Rob Bonta** (2:01)
We want them to start harming our kids knowingly. They designed a dangerous product. It was something they knew was dangerous and they lied to the public about it. So we want them to end those practices, stop visiting harm upon our kids. The features that they have, including infinite scroll and autoplay and beeps and alerts and likes and ephemeral content hurt kids.

**Janet Jaleel** (2:22)
Parents who said that social media platforms played a role in their children's deaths, gathered outside a federal courthouse in Oakland in California, holding a banner with the names of their sons and daughters.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:35)
Emmy didn't want to die. She loved her family. She loved her pets. She loved her frogs, her geckos and our time at the lake house.
She loved her life. What she could not survive was the hopelessness and the helplessness that was created and amplified by the design choices that Meta put in front of her.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:54)
This wasn't an accident. My son did not take his life. My son was killed. It's a design choice, a company that builds its platforms to maximize a child's engagement, click after click, at the cost of the child's safety.

**Janet Jaleel** (3:12)
But Meta completely denies the allegations, arguing they're unsupported by any evidence. Our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali, was in court as the trial began.

**Lily Jamali** (3:23)
We heard opening statements from both sides. An attorney for the state of California opened saying that Meta hid the truth about how addictive its platforms are. And she tried to show that by drawing contrast between what Meta executives have said about how safe Instagram and Facebook are in public, and what internal documents show about what they knew about the actual user experience. Surveys showing, for example, a quarter of users as young as 13 experiencing bullying, seeing nudity and violence.
Meta by Contra said it's been very transparent, that they've used their own research to make changes, built tools aimed at helping with things like time management on the platform. You could also see Meta's lawyer trying to sort of preemptively soften the impact of language in emails among Meta employees that jurors are going to see later in the trial.

**Janet Jaleel** (4:13)
And what would it mean if Meta were to lose this trial?

**Lily Jamali** (4:17)
It would mean that they could face significant financial penalties. The attorney general of California made clear at a news conference today that they will be asking for exactly that significant payment.
But the AGs are, the attorneys general, I should say, are not being terribly forthright about what that number will be. I think they think it's a little early to get into numbers. Bigger picture what they want, and they've been very clear about this, is that they want to see major changes to Meta's business model and end or a curtailing of what states they are, these addictive features that are all about addicting young users in their telling of things, whether that's infinite scroll or push notifications.