SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Now we have on the line one of the attorneys general who first filed the lawsuit against Meta in 2023. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, welcome back to the program.
ROB BONTA: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you.
PFEIFFER: Over the course of this trial, do you expect to learn anything you don't already know about what Meta knew about how its products affect young people, when it knew it and its internal deliberations about that?
BONTA: Not really. You know, when we go into a case, we have done all of our due diligence, so we don't expect any major surprises here. We know what our case is about. We think we got the goods on this one. And we know that Meta designed and deployed a dangerous product that visited mental-health harms on kids. They knew that it was dangerous, and they lied about it to the public. And we believe we're going to prevail in this case.
PFEIFFER: And Meta, of course, denies that. And it says it put in place policies to protect young people - policies like muting notifications at night, policies like a one-hour timer on Instagram for teenagers. What are your thoughts about its denials?
BONTA: That they are reaching, and their position is that this is a work in progress. That's their position - literally, what they said in court. And these are tissue-paper defenses - approaches - that are easily overridden by a child with a swipe of a finger and perhaps were designed to not address the underlying issue because they like teen time spent, as they call it.
They think that 11- and 12-year-old young kids are special, and they think that the young ones are the good ones. They want young kids on their platform as frequently and as long as possible, so they've created features that keep them coming back and keep them on as long as possible. Some of the measures that they say they put in place they only put in place after we brought our lawsuit. So query whether you think those are good-faith measures to address a real issue or not.
PFEIFFER: Do you think they have the ability to make truly child-proof safeguards and simply haven't done it?
BONTA: Absolutely. And some of those safeguards are set forth in a bill that I supported here in California - a bill to prevent harms to kids from addictive social media. Things like preventing kids from being on social media for more than an hour and then locking them out - completely locking them out. A parent can override if the parent wishes, but - and then making sure that there's no ability to get on the platform between reasonable hours at night when a kid should be sleeping and preparing for school, like, say, midnight to 6 a.m. That's possible. They don't do it. They can do it, but they're not.
PFEIFFER: Attorney General, if you win this case, is it money you hope for or policy changes or a combination of both?
BONTA: It's safety for our children. It's kids not suffering mental-health harms - not suffering depression, not suffering anxiety, not suffering body-image issues, addictive tendencies, learning loss, not committing suicide because of mental-health harms. That's what I'm seeking. I want to protect our kids.
PFEIFFER: But what would accomplish that? Would it be making Meta pay or making Meta change and make policies that truly are safeguards?
BONTA: The most important change here is them to change their business practices, them to keep kids off the platform in the middle of the night, them to limit the duration of time that a kid can be on the platform. We have underlying issues with many of the addictive features, from infinite scroll to auto-play to beeps and alerts to likes to disappearing content to the algorithmic feed. We want them to stop lying about the harm that it causes to kids.
Almost in all of our cases, the changes - the behavioral changes, the prospective relief - we call it injunctive relief - is what's most important. But I'll also say we are interested in, as part of the - of holding Meta accountable, for them to pay - to pay civil penalties and disgorgement and restitution. But that is secondary to the business-practice changes we're seeking.
PFEIFFER: And if they did pay, what would you use that money for - the state of California - to try to achieve your goals?
BONTA: Well, restitution is restitution. So that goes to victims, to those who are harmed, to families who've had a kid who's suffered mental-health harm or, you know, in some horrific tragic cases, have lost a kid to suicide. The disgorgement or the civil penalties would be used to continue to do important consumer protection work across the state. Maybe we would use it with respect to our ongoing case that we have against TikTok or others in the industry who are visiting the same harms in many of the same ways against many of the same kids. So there are many appropriate, beneficial uses for that funding.
PFEIFFER: California Attorney General Rob Bonta, thank you again for coming on the show.
BONTA: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
PFEIFFER: And a note. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charity founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is a financial supporter of NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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