The Current - Meta’s settlement that could transform social media for kids

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, will pay up to $18 billion US in a landmark U.S. case. The tech giant will also make big changes to how youth use its platforms, including time limits. What does this settlement mean for the future of social media, and the effort to keep kids safe? We're joined by Clare Duffy, a tech reporter for CNN Business who breaks down the settlement, Taylor Owen, the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications at McGill University, who sat on the government's advisory panel on online safety, looks at what this could mean for social media users in Canada, and Ben Waldman, the Co-founder and CEO of Gander Social, a new Canadian social media network, talks about the challenges of making a safe and ethical social media platform.

If you're looking for a beach read or a beach listen, I can give you both. Hi, I'm Matea, the host of bookends, one of Canada's favorite podcasts about books. We feature authors from all around the world and books from every section of the bookstore. If you want something sweeping and historical, you might like my interview with Maggie O'Farrell, the author of Hamlet, about her new book. Or if sci-fi is more your speed, I just talked to Robert J. Sawyer about cheating death by uploading your mind to a computer. You can check out those conversations and more on bookends with Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. I'm Susan Ormiston, and this is the current podcast. No amount of money is ever going to bring my beautiful daughter back. Amazer every day. She should be going off to college. She would have graduated from high school. Victoria Hicks' 16-year-old daughter Alexandra died by suicide in 2020. Her parents say she was addicted to social media, and that played a role in her death.

Earlier this week, Victoria stood outside a California courtroom after the tech giant meta settled in a landmark case, agreeing to make major changes to its products and to pay up to $18 billion in fines. Three times now, with trial in L.A., they were found liable. In New Mexico, they were given a huge fine, and then now this, they've settled. There's lots of lawsuits coming for these companies, lots of parents. Justice is possible. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, agreed to the settlement after a number of states in the U.S. claimed the company knew their products were addictive to kids and misled consumers about their safety.

It is the latest loss for the company in a string of court defeats, and this settlement is seen by many as pivotal in the fight to make social media safer. In a moment, we'll hear from a new made-in-Canada social media. media company about the challenge of trying to make a safer social media product. First, I'm joined by Claire Duffy. She's a tech reporter for CNN and host of the CNN podcast Terms of Service with Claire Duffy. She joins us from New York. Claire, good morning.

Susan, thanks for having me. Can you remind us what was the original lawsuit against META? So this was a multi-state lawsuit brought by 29 states back in 2023. And these states attorneys general had accused META of intentionally designing its platforms to be addictive to kids with features like the infinitely scrolling feed, the recommendation algorithms, the frequent notifications. They also accused the company of hiding research that it had internally that showed that its platforms were dangerous for young people and instead talking publicly about its commitments to safety. And they also accused the company of illegally gathering data

from children under the age of 13 without their parents' consent. Now, META has repeatedly denied those claims did not admit wrongdoing as part of this settlement, but certainly a big move only a week and a half into this trial, where META CEO Mark Zuckerberg was expected to take the stand. You can imagine that that is part of why META agreed to this deal. They didn't want to have to put their CEO on the stand to face tough questions about these claims. Interesting. So it's also, it's paying up, but it's also agreed to make some changes to their platforms.

What types of changes? That's exactly right. So META agreed to pay $18 billion as part of this settlement, which is the largest settlement with a big tech platform in history. But more importantly, I think, are these changes that META has agreed to, things like a two-hour daily time limit for users 13 to 17 that applies across Facebook and Instagram. Only parents can change that. A night mode that will make the apps restricted from midnight to 6 a.m. A school mode that will reduce the number of notifications that kids receive during the day. They'll be removing likes from teens' content by default, removing access to extreme makeup, beauty filters.

And these are all things that activists and parents, like the ones that we heard from in your intro, have been asking this company to make for years. It has now agreed to do so as part of this settlement. And importantly, Susan, the company has also agreed to allow an independent auditor to evaluate how it's implementing these changes. I think that may be the biggest piece of this settlement is that metal will no longer be able to grade its own homework, if you will, on safety. It is going to have to have outside accountability and we'll evaluate how well these tools are actually working to keep young people safe.

That's super interesting. Will these changes just be in the United States, Claire? So these changes should apply across META's platforms globally from my understanding. And I also think the other really interesting piece of this is that we could see broader industry change coming out of this settlement. Meta has basically said it will pay 70% of that $18 billion unless TikTok and YouTube agree to make similar changes and pay about $6 billion each. And the state attorneys general have already said they are willing to go after TikTok and YouTube in court to get them on board with a similar agreement. So this really could be the start of a much broader change to how young people are able to engage on social media across these various platforms. So 18 billion,

for a company like META, even 70% of that. What does it mean for a company the size of META? Yeah, $18 billion really is a drop in the bucket for META. It earned about $60 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone. That said, I will say that these changes could have an impact on META's bottom line. If they do successfully reduce the amount of time that teens spend on its platforms, meta's business model really is based around getting people to spend as much time on the platforms as possible, so that it can serve them as many ads as possible.

So if teens are spending less time, viewing less ads, that could have an impact on META's bottom line. But certainly this is a very big company. You know, it has plenty of other ways to make up that revenue. I don't know that this will have a fundamental change in META's business. But there are hundreds of other lawsuits, as you heard that parents say in the intro as well, hundreds of other lawsuits that this company is facing from individual families,

from school districts, we could see additional financial penalties if the company loses in those other cases. And so we do think this is really just the beginning of the sort of pain that META is going to feel because of this wave of litigation. In fact, there have been other losses for META this year. Just briefly, remind us what happened in those cases. All right. So META has already lost two of these similar cases. One in Los Angeles, where a young woman had accused it of intentionally designing platforms that addicted her and harmed her mental health. causing suicidal ideation and body dysmorphia.

That case was against both META and YouTube, who lost and were ordered to pay collectively $6 million to that young woman. Meta also lost a case in New Mexico. It was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars in damages in that case that had accused it of failing to prevent predators from having access to young people on its platform. So META already on the hook for around $1 billion of damages before we even got this multi-state case. And again, there were some attorneys general in the United States who did not sign onto this settlement this week. The Florida Attorney General, for example, called this agreement

peanuts compared to the harm that he believes META has done. And he said they are still planning to take this company to court. So I do think that we could see more to come in terms of penalties that META could face following this agreement. And just briefly, your assessment, how is this moment being viewed for advocates who have been fighting so long for change? I think, you know, it's an exciting moment and it's also a tough moment. As you hear so many parents and advocates wish that META has made these changes sooner before more children, they alleged were hurt by these platforms. And so on one hand, it is a win.

These are changes that they have been asking for. On the other hand, I think there is some frustration that this didn't come sooner. And I think there's also, you know, looking at this with some skepticism where META is now saying, we are being the leaders in this industry. We want TikTok and YouTube to follow us as if they didn't get to this place only because they were dragged there in court. So I think a bit of a mixed bag, but certainly I think people are looking at this hopefully as a turning point where we see more change to come. Thanks so much, Claire. Thanks for having me.

Claire Duffy is a tech reporter for CNN and a host of the CNN podcast, Terms of Service with Claire Duffy. She is in New York. Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communication at McGill University, part of an expert panel advising the Canadian government on online safety. Good morning, Taylor. Good morning. So what's your view? How pivotal is this settlement?

Look, I think this settlement really shows how important and meaningful litigation and the legal system can be to both holding technologies, companies accountable ultimately into making their products safer. But it also shows the limitations of them. These are not a substitute for governance. They help the governance process. But ultimately what we need to be working towards here is a solution where governments and democratic societies are setting these rules, not the tech companies and the legal systems themselves.

Taylor, I'm sure you've heard it. Many people are making the comparison of, this fight against social media giants and big tobacco years ago. Is this social media's big tobacco moment? I mean, there's some similarities in the sense that the discovery process, for example, in these court cases is exactly how we learned a lot about the harms of smoking. And we knew and we learned that the companies actually knew a lot about those harms before the public did.

So in the sense that we are learning more about the topic via the legal process. It's similar. The difference is that smoking is a very different kind of product. I mean, there is no positive attributes of smoking. There are many positive attributes of social media, which is in part why you need a slightly more sophisticated regulatory process to govern what can and can and can't be done and how these companies will be held accountable than just blunt legal objects like you had in the tobacco case. Meta says that kids will have the option now to turn algorithms off. How big a deal is that and will kids do it? I mean, it is part of the solution here. And I think it's interesting that many of the design changes that Meta has

agreed to in this settlement agreement are the same things that they have denied for a long time caused any harm. So these are the things that the plaintiffs in this case claimed caused harm, and that it meant to denied it. And now they're agreeing to make a whole host of different design changes. The challenge with them, though, is that they're time-limited. They're only doing this for the next five years. They're, to my understanding, counter to what the previous interview said that it's just in the U.S. I think this is just in the U.S.

I don't think this does anything for Canadian kids. They reserve a right to fight any future law that does the same thing in other jurisdictions. So, like, there's a lot of limitations on this. The auditor that you mentioned in the previous conversation has no actual power. They have some investigative power, and they can report on a determination of effectiveness, but meta ultimately decides here. So these really aren't a substitute for meaningful governance. they help us get there because we all now know a lot more about the problem.

And we see sort of the feasibility of actually implementing these kinds of design changes. It's clearly now possible. It's worth flagging that meta is denied a lot of these things were possible for a long time as well. We'll now see that they are. But they're definitely not a substitute for meaningful, accountable governance that applies over the long run to all social media products. for Canadians and are ultimately held accountable by democratic government. So we know we've heard that the Canadian federal government is proposing a social media ban for kids under 16. It's been tried in other countries.

What are they proposing? Well, the federal government is proposing a wide range of things. The core is the creation of what's called a social digital safety commission, which will be a regulator. that will be able to enforce the kinds of design changes that we've seen as part of the settlement agreement. Things like, as you said, turn off auto-scrolling, not letting adults direct message kids, the whole host of things that we know are harmful and yet are still embedded in the tax. But more importantly, that will apply to Canadians, that will have big fines attached to them, 3% of a global revenue for the company not following that.

No expiry date. These will go on over time. The Canadian legislation also covers chatbots, AI chatbots, which are more and more a part of our digital lives. And this agreement says nothing about quite conspicuously. So I think the regulations that we're talking about in Canada address the same problem, which is that there are design flaws or problems embedded in these products. And we need to ultimately force companies to change the design of their products, to

prioritize safety over profit. But it does so in a way that's ultimately far more robust and democratically accountable. Does anything about this settlement change how regulators here in Canada are looking at that social media ban proposing it? I mean, I think the social media ban is a component of trying to force companies or the forced community restrictions. ultimately, is a way of trying to get companies to comply with the regulations. So it doesn't say necessarily anything about the ban, but it does help and emboldened governments to move swiftly on regulation, because we now know more about the harms. We know that these solutions are feasible.

These design changes are possible because Matt has just agreed to do them. And we are going to see an increasing number, as we've heard, of these cases, B. over the coming years. So all of this, I think, empowers the government to move swiftly on the regulations that are actually the better solution to this problem than litigation alone. Taylor, we all know people, not just kids, who are addicted to scrolling. Where does this settlement leave the rest of us when it comes to potential harms of social media? Well, it's another reason we need real, meaningful regulation because that does not just apply to kids. The Canadian bill says that there are specific things that need to be done for products that are likely to be used by children.

But there are a whole host of things that need to be done for everybody. Because we all, as you say, are engaged with these tools and then we know intimately that there are aspects of the design of these products that are harmful. And it should be incumbent on the companies building those products to ensure that they're safe when they enter into the products. the Canadian market, and that's the job of governments to ensure that they are for all of us. All right, Taylor, thanks so much for helping us walk through this whole settlement and what it means. My pleasure. Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media, and Communications at McGill University. He was also a part of an expert panel advising the Canadian government on online safety and also an advisor to a new social media company called Gender.

From ice raids in the U.S. to migrant boats off the shores of Europe, immigration has always been a hot-button issue. But here in Canada, that conversation has always sounded a bit different. I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News podcast Frontburner, where recently we did a deep dive into how a bunch of Canadian politicians really changed their tune on the issue of immigration. And what that means is the country shrinks its population for the first time in history. You can find those episodes on the front burner feed wherever you get your podcasts. Ben Waldman is the CEO and co-founder of Gander. It's a Canadian social media app that launched just in July as an alternative to social media giants like meta and TikTok. Ben, good morning.

Good morning. Thanks so much for having me. Exciting to be here. So what is Gander? How does it work? So Gander is a social network for real people, like real connections. We've designed this for adult humans. It's away from the outrage, the like counts, and the manipulation. We built it really in response to places like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok that promised us all community and discovery and connection and are no longer delivering that.

So we designed something that's away from algorithms that favor all the outrage and the misinformation and the bots and the trolls and the bullying and even for an individual. interference, and then, of course, now AI. All of that that has been done at the expense of people, adults, kids included. And so Gander is a little slice of the internet that's just for humans. We built it without algorithms and no light counts, no selling your data. It's for real human adults, and it's built on Canadian values. So you say, you've said in the past that there are no algorithms, but algorithms are key part of the model of most social media companies to keep people engaged in your platform.

So what problems do you have trying to solve that? So we're actually pretty happy at Gander not having people addicted to the platform. That's actually one of our performance indicators is we don't look at people's daily use of Gander and we hope that people don't spend all day scrolling. We specifically designed this with chronological feeds. We've also designed an algorithm, but it's based around conversation. So who is it that you're connected to and what conversations are they involved in? We do have something that's like reels.

We call it flicks that you can scroll through, but it's also algorithm-free. So it's not playing with your dopamine and not keeping you hooked all day. And we're pretty proud of it. and people really are genuinely responsive to it. People are just happier in Gander. You have said that Gander promises to get rid of bots, trolls, and outrage. Can you stick to that? Yeah, well, I mean, right now we're, it's painful.

Let me tell you. It's not easy to do, but we are verifying humans. When you come into Gander, if you want to post, if you want to comment or chat or engage with another person, you have to verify that you're in fact a human. We do that as non-invasively as possible. We work with Canada Post. They have an app called Identity Plus, which checks that you're a human adult.

And they just give us that signal. They say, yep, this is a human, this is an adult. We don't know any information about you. You're free to browse and post anonymously or pseudo-anonymously. And they delete your data within a couple of hours. And then we're looking at other methods as well. Currently, if you go to a university, you can use your university email

to verify, and we're looking at other methods so that we just continue to guarantee that people are human on the platform. In the recent settlement, META has talked about age verification. They're going to make changes to make sure that happens. How are you doing that? And is that successful? Yeah, so it is a challenge. And, you know, honestly, it shouldn't take courts to force these kinds of decisions. You know, Canada has had big cases here, too. I spoke to the parents of Harry Burke last year, whose son killed himself after being sexorted on Snapchat. That was in 2024.

This stuff happens in Canada, and I'm a dad. My kids are a little bit older now, but I saw them go through the social media phase. And there was no way I wanted to start a platform where I'd end up in the newspaper the next day. And so we made the decision that people would have to verify. The trick is to do it without taking people's data. We don't want people's data again, or we don't take their data, we don't sell their data. We don't have an algorithm to manipulate them with, so it's largely useless to us. And having more information makes a company like Gander a target for cybersecurity.

So we avoid all that. However, that does mean finding solutions where we can still, determine that someone is most likely an adult and a human. And that's challenging. But we're a tiny little company, and we manage to do it. There's zero reason that a company like Meta couldn't have done this all along. The difficult part there, though, is leaving it in the hands of a company like Meta. Meta already has so many data points on, you know, they have your, most likely your name, your age, your behaviors, what you like to shop, what you react to, all of this stuff. And kind of the last missing piece really is your identity.

And so leaving it directly in the hands of company like meta or other giant platforms is really a big risk. Not so much on a cybersecurity point, but having more information about you. But Ben, just very briefly, how do you verify what age your users are and is there a minimum age? Oh, yes, absolutely. Gander is 18 plus. We use the users who come in have to use an app to verify. It's called Canada Post, Identity Plus. They use that app and they verify their identity. And that tells Canada Post, yes, this person is an adult over 18 and a human.

And they let us know, yep, they're good to go. And then they delete their data. Everyone is also worried, again, about disinformation and misinformation. How do you guard against those threats? Yeah, so that's a tricky one too. So Gander, we spent a lot of time working on our community guidelines. And so we worked with legal experts and decided to base our community guidelines on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. And so for one thing, that means that we protect against hate and that kind of thing.

We make sure that users aren't bullied. But part of that is not covered in the charter is misinformation. And so what we've decided to do is to include labeling on posts, when people post links to news. You can actually post news on Ganner that identifies what the bias is of the publisher, within a certain guess and what fact-checking record they have, so people can actually see that. Ben, I just want to get in just before we have to go here. What's been the response amongst Canadians?

Well, certainly right now with the trade war and everything, people are very excited. We've seen a lot of growth. We've gone from, I think, it was 12,000 people at Canada Day to now over 40,000. And that just keeps going every day. But the response really is people just, they call it, refreshing. It's like just a different place to be. It's like a dip in a cold lake on a hot day. People are really enjoying being away from all the manipulation and all of the outrage.

A startup is always an adventure, isn't it, Ben? Yeah, it is. Absolutely. All right. Thanks for sharing Gander with us. Great. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Ben Waldman is the CEO and co-founder of Gander. He was in Ottawa. You've been listening to the current podcast. I'm Susan Ormiston. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.