How do we keep kids safe on social media? Ask them.

From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here. Back in August, Metta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims that its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, harmed kids, $17 billion. As part of that agreement, Metta is trying to enlist other platforms to also throw some money in the kitty, and change what being a kid online actually looks like, with things like daily limits on usage, an end to the middle of the night scrolling, notification, silence during school. It seems like a long-awaited attempt to reset the rules. We did a deep dive on the settlement in our last episode, but the new agreement is just one piece of a much bigger effort. There are lawsuits, age verification, parental controls, and also trying all kinds of things to keep kids safe online. And all that sounds well and good except for one thing. If you're a teenager today, you can't really quit the internet. Your school is there, your friends are there, a pretty big chunk of your social life is there. And the people who actually live that life have some ideas of their own. We understand where social media can negatively impact us, we've grown up online, you want to protect teenagers, you want to protect children, but you should let us have a voice. From a court of future news and PRX, this is Click Here. The show about how technology is changing everything. I'm Deena Temple Reston. It seems to have an idea on how to protect kids from the internet. If you're a parent, you might want to think twice before gifting your teen or pre-teen a smartphone. Take away all my daughter's devices. No smartphones before high school. There is of course another possibility. Ask the kids. So today on the show, what happens when the people we're trying to protect get a say? Stay with us. Click For Click Here comes from Serval. Your IT team could be building infrastructure, solving real problems. Instead, they're stuck resetting passwords and approving access requests, running the same support playbook over and over again. And that's not a capability problem, that's a work design problem. Serval fixes it. You simply describe what needs automating in plain English, no technical jargon needed, and Serval builds the automation for you. No drag-and-drop builders to wrestle with, no consultant fees, eating your budget, no waiting months for implementation. The result? IT stops being a bottleneck and becomes the operational engine that moves the business forward. And Serval backs this up with a guarantee that half of your IT tickets will be fully automated. Test it for yourself. One more or start a free four week pilot at serval.com/click here, that's s-e-r-v-a-l.com/clickhere. Serval.com/click here. Support for Click Here comes from Nord Security. Here's the challenge. IT teams need to see what's happening in browsers, but they can't slow anyone down or disrupt their workflow. 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It passed a law that essentially puts parents at the front of the app store. The App Store Accountability Act, a new Texas law aiming to restrict children under 18 for making app store accounts or purchases without parental permission. The law was all set to take effect, and then it ran into someone lawmakers probably weren't expected. A quiet teenager who, by your own telling, hadn't followed politics much. If you met me a year ago, I would be very quiet. I was not knowledgeable about the things that were happening around me in terms of like law, like politics, and I was. This is ZB. She's 17 and lives in Texas. We're only using her initials because she's still a minor. Her dad gave us permission to talk to her, and that thing she just said about being quiet a year ago is worth remembering. Because when ZB heard about the new Texas law, she was decidedly not quiet. She thought about the mechanics of how it would work, and it was essentially saying that if she wanted to download an app, she had to ask her dad first. I thought that I would not like this. I mean, you know, kids really would not like this. It's not that ZB thinks kids should have free reign online. She gets why parents worry. There's a lot of bad stuff out there. What she doesn't buy is that the answer is to simply keep teenagers out. Because for her, the internet isn't just a place to scroll. It's where a lot of teenage life happens. And ZB has built a pretty big presence there. I have around 1 to 2 million engagement on my TikTok platform. I post academic advice for teenagers my age, relatable content, you know, like driver's license tips, or what classes you should take, or, you know, job aspirations, things like that for kids my age. A while back, ZB was getting ready to take her driver's test, and she went online looking for tips, and she couldn't find much. And to like myself, I wish there was more post on advice for getting your driver's license. And so I took it upon myself to actually, you know, make that post. The next day she was at school when she checked TikTok. The internet was really slow, and I was waiting, and I was waiting, and I was waiting. And then finally the post loaded. And then I see that it has like 80,000 likes. And I see the views, and I see like how many followers I've gotten on it, and I've seen the comments, and I'm like, oh my god, and I'm just sitting there. She immediately texted her dad. And I was like, oh my god, look at this. And then she started reading the comments. I take my driver's license test in a few hours, and then they followed up, and were like, I passed. There's hadn't passed, at least not yet. But they were like, I'm gonna take this video, and I'm gonna use it, and I'm gonna pass. And TikTok is just one piece of ZB's teenage life online. ZB is an editor at the school paper, too. And so I use Discord, I use Reddit, I use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all as means to upload my stories, all as means to get the interviews that I need, get the sources. So I felt like I wouldn't be able to report on the stories that I do if it was implemented, right? >> So from where ZB was sitting, this wasn't just about getting permission to download an app. It could put a gate in front of a pretty big part of her life. Then her journalism advisor posted something that caught her attention. There was a lawsuit challenging the new rules. >> And it included an informational session about what the attorneys and what the case was, and so I was like, huh, okay. >> Having an opinion about a law was one thing. Joining a lawsuit against the state of Texas was something else. And she had another hurdle to clear, to her dad, because, well, he actually liked the law. >> Me and my dad are pretty close, and he didn't think that it was a good idea initially. >> And her dad had a pretty classic dad concern. >> It was worried, you know, as most parents about the strangers online, and I can see that. I can see you don't want your child interacting with the wrong person. >> ZB understood that, but she knew something about her dad that seemed important here. It already raised one. kid on the internet. And he hadn't done it by keeping her away from everything that worried him. He talked to her. He told her what to watch out for. So ZB asked him to think about her younger sister. I told him, "Hey, if you restrict my younger sister and you use this to restrict her apps from a young age without teaching her that literacy that you taught me when I was her age, then she's going to be in favor of rude awakening when she's older." In other words, what worked for her wasn't being kept off the internet, it was being taught how to navigate it. Why not do for other kids what her dad had done for her? Teach them how to be online, instead of just keeping them off. And that's kind of what one of them over, I would say. He was like, "Okay, maybe you have a point." With her dad on board, ZB joined the lawsuit, and she ended up working with a first amendment lawyer named Abigail Everdale. Abigail had been watching what happened when other countries tried to limit access to the internet. Australia, for example, bars anyone under 16 from creating a social media account. And teenagers have been finding ways around it. I think what Australia has shown is something that really shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, that if you have a pool and your solution to the problem of young people drowning in the pool is to put a gate around it, it's going to be an imperfect solution because people are going to find their way over the gate. And if you don't teach them to swim, you're not actually solving for the problem. Teach them to swim, which sounded an awful lot like what ZB had just told her dad about her little sister. Only now she had to explain that to a federal judge. ZB's job was to show the court what being online actually looked like for her. In my statement, I talked about how I use social media in my everyday life, how I use Reddit, and how I as an influencer try to post my academic content through TikTok and how I try to make content relatable for teenagers my age and try to educate them in the ways that I can. And the judge listened. He blocked the law. Federal Judge Robert Pittman issued a ruling Tuesday siding with those plaintiffs saying the law is overbroad. And would be like asking every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and then require parents to consent before a child could come in. And then again, when they try to buy a book. And for a minute, ZB and kids all over Texas who oppose the law had won. Then the state appealed. An appeals court ruled that the law could take effect while the case played out. So ZB and other plaintiffs tried one more court, the Supreme Court. They asked the justices to put the law back on hold. In July, the answer came back. No go, they said. The Supreme Court wasn't saying the Texas law was constitutional. That fight is continuing. And the case is now in the fifth circuit on appeal. Abigail Everdale again. We don't have a decision yet. The fifth circuit might uphold the lower court's decision. It might overturn it. It might send the case back down to a lower court to decide what to do next when we're just waiting to find out. And in the meantime, the law is in effect. And we're still seeing how app stores and developers are deciding to comply with it. And there was something strange about that outcome that ZB couldn't help but notice. If I didn't have access to the internet, I wouldn't have known about it either. And it probably would have just passed without us teenagers having a voice. For all the years we've spent arguing about kids in the internet, the law still hasn't really settled on what rights kids actually have there. That legal frontier is being defined before our very eyes. And ZB thinks what's missing from a lot of these efforts to protect kids are the kids. You want to protect teenagers, you want to protect children. But you should let us have a voice in what we want to say as well about this. ZB wants adults to listen. But there's another part of this that's a lot more complicated. The moment when nobody is looking over your shoulder, when it's just you and whatever is happening on that screen. After the break, we meet two people who think that may be where the most important or begins. We'll be right back. Support for Click Here comes from Odo. Business software is expensive. And when you buy it from lots of different companies, it also gets confusing and slow and hard to integrate. Odo solves that because all their software is connected on a single affordable platform. So you can save money without missing out on the features you need. Odo has no hidden cost and no limit on features or data. It has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have. Everything from websites to sales to inventory and accounting. All linked and talking to each other for no additional charge. Check out Odo at odo.com. That's odo.com. That's odo.com. When you look at the news, do you ever feel like you're not getting the whole picture? I'm David Sarota, investigative journalist and host of Lever Time, the flagship weekly podcast from the independent news outlet, The Lever. Every week on Lever Time, our team dives deep to uncover the real story behind the biggest news of the moment. We uncover the corruption, corporate influence, and political power driving the headlines, from which lobbyists spot your congressman to how your personal data became a billion dollar business, to why air travel in America somehow keeps getting more miserable. It's original reporting, sharp analysis, and candid conversations you will not hear anywhere else. Subscribe to Lever Time, wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Rich sees kids in his office after things have already started to go wrong. He's a pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital, and he runs a clinic for kids whose relationship with technology has gotten seriously out of whack. But here's the interesting thing. Michael doesn't think the answer is necessarily less technology. In fact, one of the first things he'd like us to stop doing is calling these kids addicted. They better analog the knee addiction model is that this is more akin to binge eating disorder, which is, of course, psychologically driven use of a necessary resource food. We don't ask people with binge eating disorder to stop eating. We ask them to regulate their eating, and that is what we do with these kids. And that distinction matters because Michael isn't trying to get these kids to stop. He's trying to get them to notice what happens when they don't. Know yourself, know your body, know your mind, and be aware that you are making conscious decisions to use or not use the screen. And Michael says you don't learn that by starting with the phone. You start with a kid. I don't ask them about their screens. I don't ask them about their smartphones or how much time they spend. I ask them about their lives. And their answers are surprisingly ordinary. Sometimes it's just get my parents off my back, but a lot of times I wish I had more friends, I wish I were doing better in school, which means the phone may be part of the problem, but Michael says simply taking the phone away doesn't necessarily solve it. And we start to identify and lead them to discover for themselves rather than being told by me that when they're doing scrolling on their phone, they're not actually talking to friends. They're not actually living the life they want to live. Michael isn't telling them what to do. He's trying to get them to notice what they're doing. Which is also why he's skeptical about drawing one bright line around what age a kid should be allowed online. 13, 16, 18, pick an age and Michael says you'll run into the same problem. There's nothing magical that happens the day you turn 13 or 16 or 18. Every kid is different. You line up 10, 13 year olds and they'll be wildly different developmental levels. Michael thinks about it more like learning to drive. We think about an automobile as a tool that gives you great freedom, great possibilities, but also can cause great harm to oneself and others. And we don't put them behind the wheel of a car just because they want to be there, but when they can handle it in a responsible way with respect for themselves and others, and we give them drivers head and we sit, white, knuckled in the front seat with them when they learn to drive. And I think that we need to do something quite similar with these power tools of smartphones. In other words, don't just hand over the keys, teach. them to drive and then trust them to notice what happens when they are. But if you present it to them in a sense where you are recognizing their agency, give them the information that even if they experiment with something, to pay attention to how they are changed by it and decide whether they want to be changed in that way. And this is about where Michael stopped being the expert in our story. Because when we mentioned another person we were talking to, Emma Lemke, he knew her. She speaks more truly to it because she is Gen Z, right? So we called Emma. And Emma Lemke is 23 and while she thinks social media can be terrible for young people, she also likes it. There are moments and I'm still on social media that I am so happy to be on. Which is a little surprising when you hear the name of the organization she founded. Log off. To understand why someone who actually likes social media started something called log off, you have to go back to when Emma was 12. That's when she first got Instagram. She had to beg her parents to letter and at first she loved it. I think being online and having access to my friends and to their Instagrams, it made me feel more hyper connected so it made me feel like I knew more about what was happening. She could see what her friends were doing, comment on their pictures, get tagged in them. She felt plugged in. But at the same time, there was another side to it. Emma had struggled with some body image issues before she got Instagram and now she was seeing a lot of content about weight. It would be stick thin models with pictures of the food that they'd eat in that day with it must have been 200, 300 calorie days, appetite suppressant lollipops, things like that that were just forced fed to me as a young person. Like Michael Rich said, Instagram didn't create these insecurities but it did amplify them. I think I had struggled as I was anxious, I had these precursors to the internet. But when you go online, it's like you're entering a fire hose of content that just exacerbates many of your issues. So I became hypersensitive to material about weight. And for Emma, the moment when all of this really clicked, was almost absurdly small. There's a bus of the notification. I had a polo-fian response like response to grab from my phone and it was kind of between that buzz and that grab that I started to ask just a simple question. It was, why? Why am I allowing social media to have so much control over me? How am I allowing it to take over my life and just what's causing this? That why became the thing Emma was interested in, not how do I get off social media. But why am I here, what am I getting from this and what is it doing to me? And she started asking other young people those same questions. How did you feel when you were scrolling, how does it make you feel now? Why do you go online? What propels you? What fills your cup and what depletes your cup? And the more she dug into it, the more she realized that adults had already done a lot of research about this. But what she couldn't find much of were the voices of the kids themselves. And that bugged her because, well, they're kind of the experts. My lived experience positions me to be an expert in the space. But positions so many other millions of young people to be experts in the space. We understand where social media can negatively impact us. We've lived through it. We've grown up online. Which of course sounded familiar. It's basically what ZB had been telling us back in Texas. Emma decided to see what that looked like in practice. By the time Emma was a senior in high school, she had turned the idea into something called the log off movement, which sounds like a movement devoted to logging off. But it really isn't. We want young people to be online, to feel safe, to feel secure, to feel like they aren't spiraling mindlessly. We want young people to have good digital lives. Good digital lives, not no digital lives. I think that it starts with awareness and reflection. Every single person I've talked to who has, in quotes, broken the spell of including myself, it started from a place of very deep, honest and vulnerability, asking, "Why do I go online? How do I feel like I'm harmed? How do I feel like I benefit?" Emma started asking herself, "When does being online actually make me happy? When do I feel like I smile the biggest when I go online? When do I get that big dopamine hit that feels productive and it makes me feel like I'm glad that I spent time online?" And it always was when I received a reel from my sister or from my friends or from my boyfriends or from people who I love and care about. So it was a reel from her sister, something funny from her friend. Things like that, Emma says, almost felt like a love language. Someone sees something and thinks, "Emma would love this." That was part of the social media she wanted to keep. She also knew exactly what she wanted less of. What I didn't love is when I was scrolling mindlessly and consuming a ton of information that I felt like was, in quotes, like, rotting my brain. It wasn't productive, it was passive, and I wasn't feeling better about myself after schooling online. Emma calls the difference between these two things her North Star, basically figure out what you actually want from being online and then use that as a guide. Once you develop your North Star and you can better understand why you go online and how you want to stay online, it's much easier to be curious and experience than if you were going in blindly. For Emma, that meant keeping the reels from her sister and making the mindless scrolling a little harder to do. I have monitoring apps, so apps that only allow me to go on social media for about five to ten minutes at a time, about five to ten times a day. In each session, you know, I can go, I can get on, I can look at those reels, but I can't scroll mindlessly. She also tried something extremely low tech. She made her phone black and white. It makes your phone less alluring. No color, no bright red, notification bubbles, suddenly your phone is well boring. I think it was the lowest screen time I'd ever had in my entire life, because it's just not appealing, it's not fun to look at. None of this is exactly revolutionary, Emma knows that. She's not saying a monochrome screen is going to solve the problems we've spent this hour talking about. What she's doing is a bit smaller than that. She's deciding what she wants to keep and what she doesn't. Which gets us back to something Michael said earlier. We can't really quit the internet, not if you're a teenager today, so yeah, put up guard rails, make the company's build safer products, but at some point the kid has to go in there. And maybe some part of keeping them safe is making sure they know what they want when they do. This is click here. Click here is a production of recorded future news and PRX. Today's show was written and produced by Megan D. Trey, Erica Gide, Zach Hersh and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cervado and fact-checked by Darren Ancrum, original music is by Ben Levenston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrators making golf, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Nicewong. And the song you're hearing right now is called "Kits" by Pencil Dive. And on the drums, that's our own Zach Hersh. Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on click here? Then check out our sister publication "The Record" from Recorded Future News. You get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kiev among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the record.media. Here's what happened in the tech world this past week. It's Tuesday, September 15th. For decades, mathematicians have been trying to solve one of the hardest problems in their field. This week, AI may have beaten them to it. Open AI announced 10,000 agents solved a version of the Navier Stokes equation, which describes the movement of water and sometimes of stars and galaxies. Humans never solved the same version. The problem involves something called the Navier Stokes equations. And all you need to know is they describe how liquids and gases move. Everything from water flowing through a pipe to air moving through the atmosphere. Open AI says thousands of its AI agents worked on a version of that problem and found the solution in 88 hours. Would you immediately raise an interesting question? If a machine can solve a problem humans have struggled with for decades, what happens to the struggle? Terrence Tao, a math professor at UCLA, told reporters that if AI can crack these problems without human effort, it damages the field. He says it's like going to the gym. The struggle of lifting weights teaches you something and if a machine lifts it for you, you learn nothing. And that breakthrough came during a week when some of the people building AI were asking a much darker question. What happens if machines get too powerful? The 27-year-old outlined his concerns in a series of social media posts when he quit writing and part the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Which is a little rattling. Jacob Cox on the AI researcher had worked at both Anthropic and Open AI and his post went viral and global. A short time later, Anthropic CEO published an open letter calling for the industry to slow down the development of increasingly powerful AI. And remarkably, some of his biggest competitors, including Open AI, Google, DeepMind and XAI, seemed to agree. President Trump waved all the concerns away, saying the US had to be China in the AI race. So the people building AI are starting to talk about slowing down, just as Washington is telling them to hurry up. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas summed it up this way. And this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it's not entirely if they're going to be killer robots. And rather they'd be American killer robots and Chinese killer robots. There's a new kind of cyber attack that begins with something extremely ordinary. Your phone rings. You did not need to answer the call, click anything or even touch your phone. Researchers at a Palo Alto security company called Calif say they found a vulnerability in WeChat, China's dominant messaging app that could allow malicious software to spread from one user to another. They call it WeWarm. And the unsettling part is how little the victim has to do. The attacker calls someone who already has them listed in their contacts and if that person answers or simply ignores the call, the attack can take over their WeChat account. Within seconds, researchers could take control of the victims wechat account of smartphone. Read and send messages to make calls and act on the victims' behalf. So once it's in your account, it can call someone in your contacts and someone in theirs. Calif says it disclosed the vulnerability to WeChat's parent company Tencent, which patched it. And there's no evidence that the attack was used against actual WeChat users. But it offers a glimpse of what AI could mean for hacking. Attacks that don't just move faster, but move on their own. And finally, last week, a supervillain showed up at a Seattle City Council meeting. Next up, we have Dr. Victor Vandum. Dome took over axon enterprise, and now Dome will be watching you. He had the masks, the white gloves and the cape, and a message for the city of Seattle. Thank you for all the cameras. Our continued cooperation through expanding Dome surveillance network is required. Dome will keep you safe by Dome continuing to watch you. Seattle has installed roughly 100 automatic license plate readers, cameras that record the plates of cars driving past them. And the man underneath the Dr. Dome mask was Clifford Kothon, a policy advisor for Washington State's Department of Commerce, and a member of the activist group, community, not cameras. The costume was a joke. The surveillance debate isn't. In August, a city council committee voted to move $250,000 away from a planned expansion of the city's CCTV network. The full council still has to approve that change, until then, Dome is watching. This program comes from Recorded Future. In cyber security, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future, know what matters, act first. If you're looking for a daily guide to cyber security news and policy, sign up for the cyber daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the record.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cyber security right in your inbox.