Listen.

It's as easy as ABC: addicting the brains of children.

They designed these programs because remember the economic model that has made Meta and Google the most profitable count- uh, companies in the history of human civilization.

They are among the most profitable.

Why? They have what they call the addiction economy, or the attention economy.

They call it attention, I call it addiction.

The more time you spend on the platform, the more money they make through advertising.

He asked him one simple question about vulnerable children.

Do you think your legal win and the jury in New Mexico finding Meta to be this public nuisance and ordering the company to pay, you know, millions of dollars, do you think that bolstered this particular federal lawsuit pursued by states, or was it just proof that this was solid legal footing all along?

I think what you've got here is an indication of two things.

I think you've got the cumulative effect of the snowball rolling down the hill that, uh, started with our trial and with the New Mexico trial and gathered snow along the way.

Uh, I think you've got, uh, the same effect growing with the Tennessee trial going on right now and with the trial going on in Oakland.

Um, but, but I think beyond that, it is also a reflection of the true merits of the case.

Uh, these are safety measures that we were begging the companies to put into place years ago.

These are safety measures that we, uh, probed and, and begged for in the Kaley trial this, this year, at the, in January, February, March.

If there was one thing you think social media could or should do to really change the landscape, to really enhance safety, um, what would it be?

If there was one thing you think social media could or should do to really change the landscape, to really enhance safety, what would it be?

be?I think that social media's choices, uh, historically have been driven by profit over safety, and I believe that with the changes that have come about through this settlement, if those changes are effectively implemented, we will see a much better landscape.

But I'll go a step further and say the one thing that I think should be added is before any new features come on, features that might be addictive, features that might be alluring, features that might have bad content, before any new features come on, I think that the social media companies should test them, just like we test any drug before it's put into major commerce, to see whether or not it's effective and to see whether or not it's destructive.

Uh, we, we don't put drugs on the market and let the market become the testing place for the drugs.

They need to be proven safe before.

And Meta used to have this slogan of basically move now, break things, and then fix it later.

Speed was the, the dictate, and I think instead it needs to be care.

Costas Panagopoulos is a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern University.

Why do you think they chose to end the fight in this way, and now?

I think they were trying to avoid Zuckerberg taking the stand.

You know, I crossed him for the better part of a day in, uh, February.

I'm set to try two more of the victim cases at the end of October, where the judge has ordered he has to come back, and this time, on video.

And I don't think he's enjoying putting this testimony down.

It's not a fun experience.

if they actually wanna have longterm changes?

Uh, it's gonna be interesting.

[dramatic music] Tell me the M&M story.

Well, it was, it was fascinating.

The, the M&Ms came in handy twice.

Uh, the...

Our argument was that these platforms had really changed the trajectory and hurt Kaylee, our plaintiff.

They led to her body dysmorphia.

They led to depression.

Was there ever a time where you felt like the light bulb came on, where you felt like there was an acknowledgement that we've designed something on purpose here that's bad, and we've been caught?

When did you and the BoodleBox folks first get together in preparation for this trial? And two, what was in those 5,000 pages? Is it stuff that you've written? Is it the stuff that goes into your workshops that you do for other lawyers? What was it that you gave this tool to make it think like Mark Lanier?

Okay, so let's tackle the first question first.

My initial work with BoodleBox was something that I happened to be doing myself, and I found myselfPushing up against the limits, and also unable to figure out how to do a couple of things that I really thought it could do, but I wasn't sure exactly how.

Now, at my law firm, I have an AI team, and I speak on AI, I write on AI, I'm a big AI guy, and I like to think that we're at the cutting edge.

My AI team gives me a weekly memo, what happened in AI this week, and because it's changing week by week.

I didn't know it would be for the trial, but I was working with BoodleBox about six months before this started, getting ready for my next trial, whatever that might be.

By October, it became clear what my next trial would be, and then I shifted gears to do that trial prep work I had been doing in general specifically for this trial.

How is this different than what you did old school, before you had this technology, that when it was just Mark Lanier, his brains, and his guts, and his team around the table, and it wasn't these powerful technological engines loaded up with tons and tons and tons of information and lots of computing power?

Now Mark Lanier is here, and Mark, all humility aside, tell us about the verdicts that you just got, which I think are going to prove to be incredibly l- landmark, uh, verdicts for these companies in a, in a negative way for them and in a very positive way for the American public.

Well, we pitched it to the jury, I pitched it to the jury as an easy case.

It's as easy as A, B, C: addicting the brains of children.

They designed these programs because remember the economic model that has made Meta and Google the most profitable countr- uh, companies in the history of human civilization.

They are among the most profitable.

Why? They have what they call the addiction economy or the attention economy.

They call it attention, I call it addiction.

We've worked with experts for over a decade to design YouTube with age-appropriate experiences and robust parental controls, and we remain deeply committed to maintaining a safe platform that all families deserve."

This is far worse, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

These are screen agers at their worst because a television, there's going to be a show or a set of shows that you may be interested or may not.

But these social media giants have algorithms that have no morality at all.

And their entire focus is to figure out what will keep you on longer and to feed you a steady diet.

It's like you go into a Barnes and Noble bookstore and there's a table of books there.

And someone might pick up a novel.

What are the actual damages? What is the harm that is done?

This is far worse, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

These are screen agers at their worst because a television, there's going to be a show or a set of shows that you may be interested or may not.

But these social media giants have algorithms that have no morality at all.

And their entire focus is to figure out what will keep you on longer and to feed you a steady diet.

It's like you go into a Barnes and Noble bookstore and there's a table of books there.

And someone might pick up a novel.

What are the actual damages? What is the harm that is done?

But social media actually makes it harder to deal with those types of interactions, and these companies knew it, and their documents showed it.

You can go back to early documents of YouTube that we were privileged to see only because the judge ordered production part of a lawsuit.

So we got to see these confidential and ultra-confidential documents where they actually wrote, "Our goal is not viewership.

It's addiction." That's what they were after.

They live in an attention economy where the more time that people's eyeballs spend on their apps, the more money they make.

And so they would set goals, "How can we increase the time people spend on our apps?" And their engineers would go to work on those goals.

"We've gotta get this much of a percentage bump this year.

Mark, if Section 230 or those who appeal to it are some who pass on the other side, as it were, in the story of the Good Samaritan, who else has passed on the other side? Regulators? Lawmakers? Are they culpable here, too?

Given that, at least at this stage, I assume all this will be on appeal andThere'll be a continuing fight for a little while but if the premise is accepted that very young people were being hurt and being hurt by deliberate manipulation, isn't the potential total number of cases astonishing?

It could be.

It depends in part on what it takes to prove these cases.

'Cause you've almost gotta have children who have been to counseling or who have been to therapy or who have some track record that shows that they've had serious problems as a result of this.

I don't think you can just say, "Hey, my kid was on social media, so give me some money." I think those cases would flail because if it's not serious enough to go to counseling, if you don't have a suicide, if you don't have some serious damage, these cases are not economically viable for a lawyer to pursue.

Remember, one of the difficulties we faced here was there's the Communication Decency Act in the nineties that set up a section called Section two-thirty, and it's been interpreted to mean that you can't hold these platforms accountable for bad content.

So you can be on YouTube, you can be on Instagram, you can have sexual exploitation taking place with minors, you can have sex stalking of minors, you can have pornographic pictures being sent and being requested.

It operates on the brain very similar ways, and I'll let Mark touch on some of the evidence we put in at trial on that which really convinced the jury.