How Tech Executives Limit Their Kids’ Screen Time, and Trump’s Race to Finish His Ballroom

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, today's Wednesday, August 19th, here's what we're covering. They knew their product was dangerous and they lied to the public. They told the world that their product was safe that it wasn't dangerous. This week, the tech giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is in court again, defending itself over claims it harmed kids by getting them addicted to social media. Their deception, their lies are at the core of our case. And we are excited about how our first. Four states, California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Kentucky, are behind the suit, arguing that Meta, quote, "harnessed, powerful, and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens." It's one of thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies, working their way through the courts. Earlier this month, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay nearly a billion in penalties for violating consumer protection laws. In this case, the states have said they will push for penalties, nearing $200 billion, almost 15% of Meta's entire stock value. At the trial, they say they plan to use internal documents and interviews with current and former Meta employees to show there were discussions inside the company about how features like infinite scroll and beauty filters contributed to compulsive use and anxiety among young users. Still, the states claim the company promoted its platforms as safe. Meta has argued that it was truthful to consumers and that it's being singled out for challenges faced by all companies on the internet, such as the difficulty of verifying users' ages. It also said it added safeguards to protect young users. Meanwhile, with the intense national focus on kids, social media, and screen time, the time has been looking at how Silicon Valley executives handle tech at home. "You know, having built Snapchat and then also specs just how do you think about devices in your kids? Well, we've got a real range, so for the two-year-old, it's like zero screen time." Over the years, high-profile execs like Evan Speagle, the founder of Snapchat, have talked about strict limits. Peter Tiel, who was a longtime Facebook board member, gave a similar answer about how much screen time his kids get. "Not very much, and I think that's very. what's not very much, an hour and a half a week. An hour and a half a week, something like that. How old are your kids? Three and a half, five years." Mark Zuckerberg has also weighed in. "I don't generally just want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or a computer for a long period of time." In all, they have acknowledged that the older their kids get, the more they'll inevitably be on screens. But with that in mind, Sam Altman, whose company OpenAI just launched ChatGPT for teens this week, said he'd prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to his very young son. I don't know when I would let him talk to AI, but I'd rather be on the late end of what's reasonable there, not the early end. Of course, I think it's great, and he'll grow up in a world where computers are smarter than him and do anything he wants. But I wanted to play in the dirt for now." Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. First, the government of Liberia has announced that it is going to take 1200 deportees from the US, the latest so-called third-country deportation agreement that the White House has reached. For more than a year, the administration has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take immigrants that the US is having trouble deporting to their countries of origin. It struck at least 35 of these controversial deals, which often send migrants to countries they have no ties to. The agreement with Liberia appears to be one of the largest of its kind. In a statement, the Liberian government said it didn't receive anything in exchange. It also said it would welcome the deportees as guests who would be free to leave the country or remain and apply for asylum. The first group of deportees is expected to arrive in Liberia tomorrow. And at the White House, a 250-person crew is working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, to finish President Trump's massive new ballroom, despite a legal challenge aiming to stop the project. Several court rulings have found that the president exceeded his authority when he tore down the old East Wing to start construction without congressional approval. And it's now gone all the way to the Supreme Court, where the administration has asked the justices to give the project the green light. The White House is arguing that the ballroom is simply too far along to be stopped, saying that it's two-thirds done and, quote, "beyond the point of return." Recently, the Times has been looking at the rise of personal injury lawsuits and how some companies are making a profit off those payouts. Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of personal injury cases across the country. There are up 70% in state courts. These lawsuits commonly ask for multi-million-dollar payouts for car crashes, construction accidents, slip-and-falls, etc. And along with the surge in claims, has come the growth of a whole industry known as "consumer legal funders," which my colleague, Ellen Gabler, has been looking into. So let's say you're a construction worker, and you hurt yourself at work, and you decide you're going to, you can't work anymore, and you're going to file a lawsuit, and you're going to sue the company that you work for, you fell off a ladder. And your lawyer might connect you with one of these "consumer legal funders," and they basically advance you money so you can pay your rent by groceries, pay some of your medical bills, and it kind of helps you live until your lawsuit settles or goes to trial. And the thing about these advances is if you lose your case, you don't owe any money back to the funding company, but if you win, and there's a payout, and you get a huge multi-million dollar settlement, you owe money back to your funder, and you owe money with a lot of interest in fees. Ellen says that in one example, a construction worker in New York won a $3.75 million settlement. After the lawyers cut, he ended up getting about $500,000 of that. The funder who backed him got 1.8 million. And recently, Ellen says, some of these funders have taken another step to profit. They've been bundling thousands of these advances together to create something known as "asset back securities," basically giving Wall Street investors a chance to buy in. So, with more money pouring into these securities, at the same time, there have been more and more concerns nationwide about fraud. For example, we talked to a lot of former employees of the funding companies, in addition to personal injury lawyers who filed these types of cases, and they said there was definitely pressure to build up the value of the case and make them more valuable. And the way that they do that, and here's the concerning part, was that plaintiffs are encouraged to kind of exaggerate their injuries in order to get more medical care, whether it's injections in their back, or more seriously surgeries, in order to jack up the value of their cases, so there's a bigger payout for everybody involved. The plaintiffs, the lawyers, and the funding companies. When Ellen talked with some of the funders that have started bundling these advances, they argued that the securities approach is helping a growing number of injured people take on insurance companies. And the director of an industry trade group for these funders said he believes fraud is minimal. For Ellen's full reporting, go to nytimes.com. And finally, Google is making a change that could have your inbox looking a lot more crowded. This week it quietly rolled out a policy that will allow candidates, political parties, and political action committees to more easily get around its Gmail spam filter starting next month. If the midterms looming, you can imagine what that could look like. A lot more emails coming through with all caps, subject lines like help bite back. We need you. Donate today. Even five dollars makes a difference. The stakes are actually pretty high for campaigns. Whether an email winds up in people's inboxes instead of spam folders can be worth millions of dollars over time. The change to Google's filter comes after years of Republicans complaining that the company's spam algorithm blocked their emails more than Democrats. Though at one point when the RNC sued Google over this, a federal judge wrote that the claims were quote, pure speculation. Some Republicans celebrated the new change as a win while a democratic strategist said Google was sacrificing what he called inbox sanity to quote, placate a false bad faith narrative. Google for its part said there will still be measures in place to make sure the emails hitting people's inboxes are, quote, relevant and useful. The climate chaos agent that comes around once or twice a decade could be stronger than ever this year. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow.