Taking Stock: What’s next for social media?

**Will Bain** (0:03)
Hello, I'm Will Bain, and welcome to Business Daily, in a week where a Chinese tech firm unveiled a humanoid robot that could outrun an Olympic great.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Watch it run, a top speed of 28.3 miles per hour, faster than Olympic champion Usain Bolt.

**Will Bain** (0:18)
Already making me feel exhausted. With us to take stock of the Business Week this week, a Takara Small, the National Technology Columnist at Canada's National Broadcaster, the CBC, joining us from Toronto, Han Lin, also back with us here on the programme, and finance professor from NYU's campus in Shanghai. Hello, both, great to have you back on the programme. Han, why don't you go first, a robot, if you could give it a skill, would it be to run as fast as Usain Bolt, or would you have it doing something else?

**Han Lin** (0:45)
You know, running in itself is fantastic, but I spent a lot of my childhood, and one of my main hobbies is mixed martial arts. So I have been fascinated by seeing them programme the robots for MMA competitions. I remember seeing one of them in particular, or two of them fighting each other. One robot knocked the head off of the other, and the other one just kept fighting.

**Will Bain** (1:06)
This sounds like where we should be investing. This sounds like the next thing that's hitting the small screen. Takara, if you had a robot, what would you give it?

**Takara Small** (1:13)
So very, it's less impressive than that. Definitely something more practical, like just cooking in nutritious meals, so taking that off my plate, although I'm tempted now. Maybe martial arts is where I should be putting my head for.

**Will Bain** (1:25)
I'm with you on practical ones. I get up very, very early in the morning, like sort of 3 a.m. for work sometimes. And we had a cartoon here in the UK called Wallace and Gromit, where he would sort of get fired out of bed and he would sort of land in all his clothes. And I need that at 3 a.m. I feel like that's what the robot I want to do. I don't know about you. You guys seem much more organized than I am for that as well. Right, yeah, we will talk more robots here on the program because it's a big theme of the week in China. We will chat about that some more on this episode of Taking Stock From Business Daily.
Should we start though in a courtroom in Oakland, California, a court case that, Takara, I don't think it's too much of a stretch, is it, to say, could pretty much reshape social media?

**Takara Small** (2:07)
It definitely could. And I think it will regardless of the outcome. We're already seeing other countries implement social media bans.
You're starting to see other social media companies start to think about some of those addictive features that are being mentioned in court, things like infinite scroll, alerts. You know, the thing that really stood out to me is the idea that Meta as well had been colluding, had been capturing data about people who are 13 and under. All of this is obviously shocking, but I think it will put a little bit of a chill into anyone that owns a social media app or platform or one that specifically targets young people.

**Will Bain** (2:45)
Right. So this is this case. You've probably heard us talk about it on World Business Report or elsewhere on the World Service over the week. But Meta standing trial, these lawsuits have really been rumbling since 2023, 29 US states, including the likes of California and New York, claiming that Meta and its platforms to the likes of Facebook and Instagram have been violating federal and state privacy laws around children. The states are seeking billions of dollars for Meta and demanding it makes changes to some of those things Kaira was just talking about on some of those apps. Meta strongly refutes all the claims, as we will hear over the next six weeks of this case. And they say that the attorneys general are chasing what they call an outlandish payout. The tech company stands by its record of creating strong protections for teens, it says. Han, what do you make of this trial watching on from Shanghai?

**Han Lin** (3:32)
In the Chinese social media, they're very fascinated by this case because when they look at it from the US side, the US debate largely begins with individual rights and corporate liabilities. So in other words, the question is, can platforms be held liable after their design allegedly causes harm? But the China side comes from a very different proposition. Its understanding and its starting point is, the state has both the authority and the responsibility to shape the digital environment in which miners develop. So in other words, the focus is on prevention of digital addiction before it happens. So there have already been for the last several years, a number of controls put in place on content feeds by age for children, restrictions of online gaming to one hour per day, screen time controls by age groups, so on and so forth.