Hi, this is Andy, I've been at a New York Times subscriber for years and year...
trying to get my teenagers interested in reading it.
“If they were to have their own logins and we could share articles, I think that would”
help get them interested. It would also then allow us to discuss with the dinner table or wherever, thank you very much. Andy, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times Family subscription.
One subscription up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Sign up more at NY Times.com/family. 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 was a 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 day at trial went. 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, in snare, 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. It's just 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 their 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 user's 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 got a real range. We got four boys, two, six, seven, and 15. So for the two-year-old, it's like zero screen time. Over the years, high profile execs like Evan Spiegel, 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.”
I wouldn't have a week or something like that. How old are your kids? Three and a half, five years. So did Mark Zuckerberg? 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. I mean, they're also very... 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 Chat GPT for teens
this week, said he preferred 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 and not the early end.
“Of course, I think it's like great and he'll grow up in a world where computers are smarter”
than him and do anything he wants. You know, I want it 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. More than a year, the administration has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take immigrants that the US is having troubled 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 an 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, 7 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.
They've argued that the ballroom is now simply too far along to be stopped, saying it is two-thirds done and, quote, "beyond the point of return." Recently, the time 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.
They're up 70% in state courts.
“These lawsuits commonly ask for multi-million dollar payouts for car crashes, construction”
accidents, slip-and-falls, et cetera. 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. 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-backed 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. In the way that they do that, here's the concerning part, was that plaintiffs are encouraged to 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 just announced 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. With the midterms looming, you can imagine what that could look like.
A lot more emails coming through with all caps subject lines like, "Help fight back. We need you. Don't eat today. Even $5 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 spam algorithm blocked their emails more than Democrats.
Though at one point, when the RNC sued Google over this, a federal judge wrot...
claims were "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 "placate a false bad-faith narrative."
Google, for its part, said that candidates and political groups will have to quote "meat
“strict security and compliance requirements," ensuring that messages people receive are”
relevant, useful, and verified.
Those of the headlines, today on the daily, "How El Niño," 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 Times 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 Mumpford, we'll be back tomorrow.
