Is this Mark Zuckerberg's 'big tobacco' moment?

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Today, dare occur, tech reporter with the Guardian and the tech industry's big tobacco moment. I'm Sam Halley on Gadigal Land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. I appear before you today as a dad with first-hand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances. On Instagram, as an expert, with over 20 years of experience, working as a senior leader, including leading online security for and safety and protection at Facebook. Dara, we're hearing there from Arturu Beha, who was speaking at a Senate inquiry in the United States back in 2023. Now, just some context, he started working for Metta's Facebook in Silicon Valley in 2009. And part of his job was simply to teach users really to be nice to each other, wasn't it? Just tell me about him. Right. Yeah, he worked at Facebook. This was before it was named Metta in two separate stents. And yes, the first one he started in 2009, and he worked there until about 2015, and he took a break to focus on his family. And then he came back right before the pandemic started. And his job kind of changed because he really wanted to focus on young people's experiences on the platform. And a lot of this was because how he saw his own daughter was being treated during that time off. As a parent, I took the work personally, and it worked hard to help create a safer environment. By the time I left in 2015, I felt the work was going in the right direction. A few years later, my 14-year-old daughter joined Instagram. She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment. She reported this incidence to the company, and it did nothing. So he was a safety engineer at Metta, as you say, he had that time off. And then he realized that things weren't good for his 14-year-old daughter. So just tell me what was happening to her. Initially, she asked if she could join Instagram before she was of age, which is 13. And he said, no, she had a weight. And so she waited. And when she finally got on, she's really into cars. And she would have responses that were really misogynistic, what seemed to be online predators reaching out to her. Okay, so he then really concerned, of course, about what his daughter is subjected to online. He returns to the company. And he says he did raise these concerns directly with the Metta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2021. Metta must be held accountable for their recommendations and for the unwanted sexual advances that Instagram enables. As soon as I understood this gap, I did what I had always done. I researched the problem, I did it at the numbers and informed Mark Zuckerberg, Cheryl Sandberg and other executives. He raised them throughout his time period. He came back in 2019 and he left in 2021. And throughout that time period, he said he spoke to Mark Zuckerberg at least 100 times. What we're seeing in court is all these internal emails that he sent to Zuckerberg where he's raising the alarm. He's conducting studies about young people's well-being on the platform and finding that they are having really bad and harmful experiences more often than not. In a carefully designed survey by Instagram in 2021, we found that one in eight kids, age 13 to 15 years old, experienced unwanted sexual advances in the last seven days. This is unacceptable and my work has shown that it doesn't need to be this way. He is now central to this trial in California where a jury will decide whether Metta is guilty of harming children with technology designed to be addictive like cigarettes. Now he was the first to give evidence, wasn't he? Just tell me about that. Yes, he's definitely the star witness in this trial and he came off cross really strong. He said that Metta had used this don't ask, don't tell strategy when it came to the safety of children. So it knew that this was happening here, ledges, but they were hiding it from the public. In the California and Attorney General Rob Bonta, he's actually leading the case against Metta. He spoke outside the court. We of course heard from the first witness a whistleblower engineer from Metta who was in charge of child safety while they're who talked about their motto, their culture, if you will, which was to move fast and break things. Unfortunately, the thing that was broken here was the mental health of our children. But what were they arguing inside the court? So they're very aligned with their arguments when the lawyers for the state governments open their statements. They use this pneumonic that said Metta's business can be boiled down to four words at begin with the letter H, which is hook, hold, harvest and hide. And so what they're saying is that Metta hooks in these young children, they hold them there through these addictive technologies. They harvest their data and then they hide that from the public. This is about our children, the next generation. Our kids, they deserve to be safe. And Metta has acted unlawfully here. We are here to hold them accountable. We look forward to continuing our trial and bringing our case forward. Well, Derek, let's just step back a moment and consider how this case came about and what the complainants are hoping to achieve. Now there are four lead states in this case, aren't there? And well, billions of dollars at stake. Right. Yeah. So this is, this is one of actually thousands of cases that have been brought over the last several years, but this one is a very major one. The other cases we've seen have been brought by individual states. We've seen individual victims, bring cases and families. And we've also seen school districts. What this one is is 29 states have joined together to sue Metta over these same allegations that it's intentionally creating addictive products to get children on the platform. And that's leading to their harm. And so these 29 states are working together, but just four of the states are representing the cohort and court, which is California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. So you're seeing there too. It's a very bipartisan issue. We have concerned parents from red states and blue states. And so it's really interesting to see this play out. And they're seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties. Right. So the kind of the ballpark figure that the attorneys general have said is 200 billion, but that really will be up to the judge and the judge will decide on the financial damages and she'll also decide on other requests that are coming from these states, such as changing how the platform works. And as I understand, the attorney generals of these states, they'll use internal documents and interviews with current and former staff to show that met a discussed compulsive use of its platforms and how various tools actually contributed to that. Right. Correct. And as someone who's been covering this and I've covered previous lawsuits, a lot of these documents are similar. So I'm familiar with a bunch of them. There's one where employees are talking about how Instagram is a drug and they say, yeah, we're basically pushers. There's all these internal surveys and reports that meta did that found that children were being harmed and showed that meta didn't do anything to ameliorate. rate that. So it's really interesting all of the internal documents that are coming out in this lawsuit and other lawsuits. So tell me, then, will Mark Zuckerberg himself met as CEO face questioning during this trial? And what does Metta have to say about these allegations? Everyone's saying that he is going to testify. We don't have the schedule yet for the witnesses. So it's kind of wait and see. But Metta is saying that these attorneys general are not sticking to the facts, and they're not sticking to the law. And then instead, they're just chasing this big payout. And specifically in the case of Arturo Brehar, they have filed tons of motions to try and stop him from testifying and trying to stop any internal documents he was affiliated with from being presented in court. They're also actively trying to get another inside whistleblower from testifying and the judges yet to rule on that. Interesting. Okay. And it's worth noting, as you say, there have been a range of lawsuits of this nature. In March, a woman known as Kaylee, she was actually awarded $8 million in damages. Pugs and tears outside an LA court as the finding in a case against big tech was handed down. After more than 40 hours of deliberations, a jury found Metta and Google were negligent in the design of their platforms. So there has been success in the courts, hasn't there? Just tell me about that case. Right. That case was the very first of these thousands of lawsuits that have these very similar allegations to go to trial. So it was a really groundbreaking case because it was the first time ever that Metta has been held liable for the design of its products. And what's really different about these cases are their product liability lawsuits. So what the plaintiffs are alleging is that there's something wrong with the actual products. It's not the content, like that's not the problem. It's the products themselves that have been designed to be addictive. It's very similar with what we saw with the tobacco cases in the 1990s. Yeah. So they're arguing it's addictive like cigarettes. Yes. Well, this trial is being referred to as the tech industry's big tobacco moment. What do you think though? Do you think this could be a pivotal moment for change? I think it's extremely significant, especially because that very first case with Kayleigh Metta lost on all counts. It was found liable. And so that really set a precedent for these thousands of other lawsuits to, you know, play out. And this one with the attorneys general is the biggest of all the lawsuits. If the judge makes a similar ruling as the last one, Metta could really be forced to change the design of its platform. What we saw with Kayleigh is under that jurisdiction, which was under California State Court, they could only award damages. They couldn't make Metta change its platform, but this one since the federal suit, they're able to demand these changes. And if Metta is forced to change its algorithm, its algorithm is its lifeblood. And that could really change its business model and change how its platforms work. If Metta loses, it could be forced to fundamentally change the way its social media platforms operate. That could include eliminating likes and the infinite scroll that encourages users to look at new posts. Well, Dera, of course, this is a case in the United States, but it could not open the way for similar legal action around the world, including in Australia. I mean, there's users everywhere who could argue they have been deeply damaged by these algorithms. They've become addicted to social media to things like Facebook and Instagram. Right. Yeah. It could open a can of worms and child advocates around the world are looking to see what happens with these cases. A lot of countries have more strict laws that govern these technology companies. The United States has extremely relaxed laws. And so it'll be interesting to see what the jury thinks. And if Metta is found viable, how the judge decides to find it and if it decides to change its platform. And so when do we expect to have a result then? The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks and then there's the jury deliberation and then the judge will be making the final decision. So we probably won't know until October at the earliest. These are the conclusions I have come to. One, Metta knows the harm that kids experienced on their platform and the executives know that their measures fail to address it. Two, there are actionable steps that Metta could take to address the problem. And three, they are deciding time and time again to not tackle these issues. Derek Kerr is a tech reporter with The Guardian. This episode was produced by Alaria Brofi and Louise Mylon, audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is Sydney Pete. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.