The Headlines - How Tech Executives Limit Their Kids’ Screen Time, and Trump’s Race to Finish His Ballroom

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Plus, the political emails are coming for you.  Here’s what we’re covering: States Seek $200 Billion From Meta Over Child Social Media Addiction Claims, by Cecilia Kang, Eli Tan and Emmy Martin Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Own Kids., by David Streitfeld Deadly Israeli Strike on Gaza Cafe Raises Doubts About Progress on Peace Plan, by Ephrat Livni and Abu Bakr Bashir Liberia Agrees to Take 1,200 Deportees From U.S., by Madeleine Ngo and Alan Feuer Trump’s Ballroom Is Rising at Breakneck Speed: 20 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week, by Luke Broadwater and Ann E. Marimow How Wall St. Profits When Personal Injury Lawsuits Pay Out, by Ellen Gabler, Robert Gebeloff and Julie Tate Google Just Made It Easier for Campaigns to Send You Fund-Raising Emails, by Shane Goldmacher Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 wasn't 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 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 ensnare 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, for violating consumer protection laws. In this case, the states have said they will push for penalties nearing $200 billion, almost 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 there were discussions inside the company about how features like infinite scroll and beauty filters contributed to compulsive use and anxiety among young users. Still, the state's 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 users' 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 Times 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 and your kids? Well, we've got a real range. 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 Thiel, 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. Hour and a half a week. Something like that. How old are your kids?

Three and a half, five years. Mark Zuckerberg has also weighed in. 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. 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'd prefer 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, 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. But, you know, I wanted to, like, 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 1,200 deportees from the U.S., the latest so-called third-country deportation agreement that the White House has reached. For more than a year, the administration has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take immigrants that the U.S. is having trouble 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 and 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, seven 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. The White House is arguing that the ballroom is simply too far along to be stopped, saying that it's two-thirds done and, quote, beyond the point of return.

Recently, the Times 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, etc. 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 worked 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, buy groceries, pay some of

your medical bills, and it kind of helps you live until your lawsuit settles or goes to trial. And 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 lawyer's 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, you know, they said there was definitely pressure to build up the value of the case and make them more valuable. And the way that they do that, and here's the concerning part, was that plaintiffs are encouraged to kind of exaggerate their injuries in order

to get more medical care, whether it's, you know, 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 nyatimes.com.

And finally, Google is making 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-cap subject lines like, help fight back, we need you, donate 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's spam algorithm blocked their emails more than Democrats.

Though at one point when the RNC sued Google over this, a federal judge wrote that the claims were, quote, 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, quote, placate a false bad faith narrative. Google, for its part, said there will still be measures in place to make sure the emails hitting people's inboxes are, quote, relevant and useful. Those are the headlines. Today on the Daily, how El Nino, 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 time 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 Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.