US creates fewer new jobs than expected

**Hannah Malane** (0:01)
Fresh data shows a shock drop in jobs in the US. It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Malane. Meta has been fined a record penalty of half a billion dollars in a court case over child safety. And Aarau is brewing in London over where the pubgoers should be allowed to drink standing up.
Hello, and we start today's programme in the US, where we've had fresh data on jobs and unemployment. Analysts are calling it weak and soft, which isn't what you want when you're in charge of the economy. US employers lost 23,000 jobs in July, and job gains from the previous two months were revised down sharply, which was unexpected. So what's going on? Here's Samira Hussain, the BBC's North America business correspondent.

**Samira Hussain** (0:51)
It came as a really big surprise. Most analysts were expecting to see jobs gains, but we saw the exact opposite. And there are some that are saying, look, this also is very seasonal. If you look at things like how many government education jobs that were lost, that has to do with the summer season and summer school being over.
But overall, as a headline, it's not really very good. Now, if you look at the way US markets have been looking at this, well, they're trading higher because they feel like the chances of a rate hike are lower.

**Hannah Malane** (1:27)
Yeah, so we've been looking at these figures because they suggest what the Fed might do next, and there's been lots of question marks over interest rates. What does the data today suggest will happen next?

**Samira Hussain** (1:39)
I think you need to take a step back and think about the way the Fed has been thinking over the last few years. They have been looking at inflation as the bigger problem that needs to be addressed, and that, look, the labor market continues to show signs of strength, and they're not really too worried about that. You know, I think there are some that believe that the Fed will continue on with this thinking. This is just one not-so-great jobs report, but it also has so many other factors that are looking towards it, and I think it's really a situation in which the Fed might just keep going with the same track that they are, continuing to concentrate on inflation, and not as much about job growth.

**Hannah Malane** (2:19)
Samira Hussein reporting for us from New York.
Meta have been fined a record penalty of more than half a billion dollars in a court case over child safety. The company that owns Instagram and Facebook received the fine in a New Mexico court for harm and addiction caused by social media. The judge said Meta was a significant contributor to the mental health crisis among the young and could be classified as a public nuisance. In response, Meta say they will appeal the ruling. Juliana Arnold is an online safety advocate and co-founder of Parents Rise. Her teenage daughter, Coco, died in New York in 2022 from what Juliana says was an illegal and fake pill that Coco got from someone she had met on social media.

**Juliana Arnold** (3:01)
For me, as a mother who lost my child to social media harms, it's obviously very bittersweet, but it finally feels good to know that the court didn't just say Meta failed kids. You know, it put a number on it, and 567 million has meaning. And the fact that the judge found Meta knowingly built the products that harmed our children and then just treated the harm as a cost of doing business, like it didn't care, really felt a little bit like a little bit of justice being done. So I think this shows us that, you know, we are moving in the right direction and that this is the first of a number of trials that are going to be happening here in the US over the next couple of years.

**Hannah Malane** (3:46)
That was Juliana Arnold there. And Meta has said in a statement that we work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. And we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.
Randheep Somal, Fund Manager at M&G Investments is with us. Randheep, Juliana is saying there that there are more court cases to come. What's the future repercussions for Meta?

**Randheep Somal** (4:17)
Yes, there's an ongoing case right now in Tennessee and one to come in California, which will be quite large given the size of the state. It's also Meta's home state.