Crypto News: Will lawmakers ban teens from social media?

Verdicts announced last week against Meta and Google present an opportunity to change young people's online lives. Kurt Wagner, who covers social media for Bloomberg News, writes today about what might come next. Plus: AI gig workers vent, confess and role-play with strangers, all to help machines learn how to sound human (free link!). If this newsletter was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

US politicians have spent years talking about regulating social media companies, or adding laws to protect young people who use their products. That talk has mostly been, well, talk. But two trial verdicts last week—one against Meta Platforms Inc., the other against Meta and YouTube parent Google—may well be a tipping point.

In Los Angeles, a jury found that Meta and Google created addictive products for young people and failed to warn them about the risks. In New Mexico, Meta was found to have misled teens about the safety of its services, even when it knew Facebook and Instagram were regularly used by sexual predators. Meta was hit with $375 million in penalties in that case.

Those verdicts, on back-to-back days, are reverberating around the social media industry. They're as damaging to these companies' reputations as they are to their pocketbooks, and social media is now in the same conversation as Big Tobacco, an industry that had its own reckoning with cigarette addiction suits in the 1990s. There are also thousands of lawsuits waiting in the wings alleging similar harms to young people.

Heads of the nation's largest cigarette companies are sworn in before a hearing of a House Energy subcommittee which was holding hearings on the contents of cigarettes on Capitol Hill in Washington. More than 40 states brought lawsuits demanding compensation for the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. Big Tobacco settled in 1998 by agreeing to pay about $200 billion and curtail marketing of cigarettes to youths. From left are Robert Sprinkle III, executive vice president for Research American Tobacco Co.; Donald Johnston, American Tobacco; Thomas Sandefur Jr., Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp.; Edward Horrigan Jr., Liggett Group Inc.; Andrews Tisch, Lorillard Tobacco Co.; Joseph Taddeo, U.S. Tobacco Co.; James Johnston, RJ Reynolds; and William Campbell, Phillip Morris USA. April 14, 1994. Photographer: John Duricka/AP Photo — Tobacco company executives testifying before a US House subcommittee in 1994 about the content of cigarettes.

To some of the industry's biggest critics, these verdicts delivered a moment of reckoning that was a long time coming. "This is a real watershed in terms of holding social media companies accountable," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The trials were able to "pull the curtain back" on the harms these platforms create and what their executives knew, he added.

What happens next could shape how this industry operates over the next decade. Meta and Google could voluntarily change the way their products work to try to sidestep future litigation, something they've already introduced with parental controls and feature restrictions for teens. They may also succeed in getting the verdicts thrown out on appeal; both have pledged to fight the trial results in Los Angeles, and Meta also plans to appeal in New Mexico.

But it's also possible that those lawmakers I mentioned—the ones who've spent years doing very little to hold social media companies accountable—may finally use this momentum to pass real legislation. "Congress always acts slowly until they act extremely quickly," Sacha Haworth, executive director at the industry watchdog Tech Oversight Project, said last week. Oftentimes "there needs to be a galvanizing moment for Congress to act—and this is that moment."

Watch: The documentary Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media — Watch: The documentary *Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media*

Watch Now — Watch: The documentary *Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media*

One path forward may be restricting access to these services for young people. Australia has already implemented a social media ban for those under 16. About a dozen other countries in Europe are considering similar restrictions, as are several US states. Even in California, Meta and Google's home state, legislators recently proposed an under-16 ban on social media.

The fact that two separate juries found social media products to be unsafe for young people is only going to add fuel to that fire. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who's spent years trying to pass a law to create more parental controls and oversight for social media, called the verdict a "monumental victory." "Big Tech has done everything in its power to blame parents and children instead of taking responsibility for designing their products to addict and harm children," she said in a statement, urging Congress to pass her bill, the Kids Online Safety Act.

Congress, of course, has had years to make moves and hasn't. Expecting something to change in a midterm election year with a slumping economy and a war in the Middle East may not be realistic. But it's also clear that momentum is growing, and not in a way that Meta, Google and others in the industry are excited about.

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