States suing Meta accuse company of manipulating its apps to make children addicted

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• Amna Nawaz:

  This past year saw a notable change, as both state and federal governments became more aggressive about taking big tech to court.

  The U.S. Department of Justice and Google are awaiting the verdict of a landmark antitrust trial that alleges Google's anti-competitive behavior led to its dominance. And Meta is now the target of state lawsuits, alleging it harmed the mental health of kids and misled the public about online safety.

  Stephanie Sy focuses on that part of the story.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Amna, more than 40 states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

  State attorneys general argue that Facebook and Instagram deliberately manipulate their apps in ways that addict kids and teens and have failed to keep them off, despite age limits.

  Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser helped lead the lawsuit.

  Phil Weiser (D), Colorado Attorney General: Meta, under federal law, cannot and should not be marketing to young people, collecting data without parents' awareness or consent. They're doing just that. Meta has identified young people, 11-, 12-year-olds, as an untapped and valuable audience, and engaged in behavior in violation of federal law.

• Stephanie Sy:

  There have been multiple stories as well focusing on Meta's struggles to protect kids from online predators and even promoting pedophile accounts through its algorithms.

  Jeff Horwitz's reporting in The Wall Street Journal has led to increased public and legal scrutiny of social media, and it's the focus of his new book, "Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets."

  Jeff, thanks so much for joining the "NewsHour."

  The state's lawsuit, I want to go back to that. It claims that Meta has misled the public about the risks to teens and younger children. You published an investigation recently about pedophiles on the platform. Talk about some of the disturbing things you found.

• Jeff Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal:

  Sure.

  I think all of this kind of goes back to the platforms being very good at deliberately seeking out sort of communities that are willing to consume content voraciously and then serving it up to them. And that can be good. That can connect you with useful hobbies. It can also connect people who desperately want to believe the 2020 or the 2024 election is being stolen, for that matter. And it can connect people who wish to sexualize children.

  And so the system is really good at that. It is extremely good at personalization. The problem is that it frequently is operating well beyond the capacity of even the people who run it to understand and intervene to stop harmful outcomes.

• Stephanie Sy:

  OK.

  So, in this research, I understand you set up a test account on Facebook, and it led you down a pretty dark path. For example, you found a group where hundreds of thousands of people who were interested in incest had joined, correct?

• Jeff Horwitz:

  I wish we found only one. This is very consistent.

  The platform and its groups you should join algorithm basically will, as soon as you start following just a couple of slightly suspect entities, will start pushing hard into, like, increasingly dark content, I mean, like really — like really, really just, like, awful, awful things involving the kidnapping of children, was literally a subject of one group.

  And this is routine. The company has tried to work on cleaning that system up. We spent six months sort of noting to them where they were coming up short, and it is an ongoing problem to this day.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And you have another article out just in the last few days about Meta's introduction of encrypted messaging, encrypted messaging on Facebook and Instagram.

  Talk about how your reporting shows the impact that that can have on efforts to stop child exploitation on the platform.

• Jeff Horwitz:

  Yes.

  So, for years, encryption has been something where sort of privacy advocates are in favor, law enforcement and governmental groups are against because it impedes investigations. I think something that has kind of gone unnoticed, but will perhaps soon be noticed because Meta is adopting end-to-end encryption both Facebook and Instagram, is how this technology, when used, paired with a fully public social network, becomes something potentially really volatile and potentially really useful for predation.

  Because having one entity that is attempting to sort of prey on another group, whether that's for human trafficking, child exploitation, recruitment of people for drug cartels, and not having any insight into the system is something that is really going to be a problem for certain efforts to combat that stuff.

  So, in other words, if you can't actually investigate the networks using the methods that traditionally these investigations have been done with, you're going to have groups such as those large pedophile groups that are actively connecting people and then sending them pretty much straight into the Dark Web.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And law enforcement, you have given examples, have used messaging and their ability to access that messaging for prosecution.

  Meta, of course, believes that privacy is the goal here, and that's why they want the encryption. Meta has also issued responses to your reporting, including the recent report on pedophile content on the platform, in which they say: "We work hard to stay ahead. That's why we hire specialists dedicated to online child safety, develop new technology that roots out predators, and we share what we learn with other companies and law enforcement."

  The statement goes on to say: "We are actively continuing to implement changes identified by the task force we set up earlier this year."

  Jeff, that's a reference to the child task force that was set up after your reporting in June about content — explicit child content on Instagram.

  My question is, has Meta addressed all the issues you have uncovered in your reporting and that's in your book?

• Jeff Horwitz:

  Certainly not, not on any of those fronts.

  No, the task force has been shut down. They haven't really paid much attention to that or highlighted that much, and even though the problems are still ongoing. No, I think there are, I think, some fundamental questions of the platform wanting to not take responsibility for the ways that it has reformulated human communication.

  This is something where they're like, oh, this is just the Internet. People do bad things on the Internet. Who are we to be able to stop that?

  The issue that arises here is that none of the communities that exist on these platforms are ones that would form in real life.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Jeff Horwitz, author of the new book "Broken Code," thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour."

• Jeff Horwitz:

  Thank you.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The addictive nature of social media doesn't just have parents, lawmakers, and advocates worried.

  Last year, more than half of U.S. teens said it would be difficult to give up social media, including TikTok and YouTube. The latest episode of our Student Reporting Labs series Moments of Truth tells the story of one teen named Connor, who faced this dilemma head-on with Instagram.

• Gus, Student:

  When I first saw you over Zoom, I was like, wow, that guy looks kind of interesting.

  And then I just remember standing next to you in choir every day. Due to proximity, we just became friends.

• Connor, Student:

  Yes, I was kind of experiencing this weird great loneliness period in my life. I'm diagnosed with bipolar and OCD. And I think I was going through a rough patch at the time.

  So that friendship was almost like of holy stature. I started like relying on you to make it through the day. We started sharing locations around them.

• Gus:

  I could kind of see the obsession starting. I remember getting like super worried about you. And I wanted to help you, but I didn't know how.

• Connor:

  I had kind of a lack of self-control. Like, I would repeatedly check, and check and check.

  The accessibility that the Internet has to kind of enable that really did not help. And I don't think that a 15-year-old kind of had that self-control.

• Gus:

  You were D.M.ing me like every hour about like how sucky everything was. It was kind of unwelcome. Since it was so frequent and so often, I gave like one-word responses and stuff, and I was also going through a lot at that point in time.

  It had really just become a lot to handle, like the problems of two people.

  I came up to you. I told you that I was — I needed to distance myself from this relationship that we had.

• Connor:

  So when we weren't talking, I tried not to really open Instagram that much. I learned to practice self-control, because the thing is, if I allow myself to consistently check the locations and consistently check the little active thing on Instagram D.M., then I know I'm going to spiral.

  And once I'm in that obsessive state, it's hard to get out of it. Now that at least I'm less connected, there's more of an open space for us.

• Gus:

  We just go on walks. We go to Goodwill sometimes.

• Connor:

  When someone's actions and what someone's doing is accessible to you at all times, I don't think that's how humanity is intended to be.

• Gus:

  It's unnatural.

• Connor:

  It's unnatural for you to have access to what someone's doing all the time. It's also a sign that maybe you're focusing on that person more than yourself.

• Gus:

  I am just grateful it worked out, I think, and how stable our relationship is. It's been a ride.

• Connor:

  A beautiful ride.

• Gus:

  Yes.

  (Laughter)