Generous to a Default
Jun 5, 2026 · 43 min · 11 segments
Become a Ctrl-Alt-Speech supporter to get extended episodes of the podcast plus the chance to submit stories for us to cover. In this week's episode, Mike…
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Jun 5, 2026 · 43 min · 11 segments
Become a Ctrl-Alt-Speech supporter to get extended episodes of the podcast plus the chance to submit stories for us to cover. In this week's episode, Mike…
No entities detected.
Mike MasnickHost
Ben WhitelawHost
We should get straight into it 'cause we've got lots to discuss, and we're gonna start, Mike, by talking a bit about product defaults, and that is not a reason for our listeners to switch off.
I think they are, you know, everyone thinks about, uh, internet speech and safety as about content moderation and about, as about policy, and product defaults are, you know, obviously one of the kind of blanket ways, one of the kind of most impactful ways that you can change the way that a platform works and the way people be- behave on platforms.
Do you remember last year when Meta announced some changes to how they were doing teen defaults? We talked a bit about it on the podcast.
They essentially rolled out plans to have a new teen experience that meant that content was more suitable for teen users, users between kind of 13 and 18, and they were piloting this in the UK and the US, Australia, and Canada.
You had the Australia social media ban had been announced, but not kind of enacted.
The Online Safety Act was being enforced, and there was a big focus on the harming of children.
You also had our good friend Jonathan Haidt doing many, many interviews [laughs] in the media about his book, Anxious Generation.
And so there was this kind of cacophony of noise and pressure around child safety and particularly kind of Instagram's role in that, which has been long documented.
Well, this week Meta announced a plan to roll out that teen default to a larger audience, a more global audience, but also onto its other platforms, onto Messenger and to the main Facebook experience.
So it's not something that's got loads of attention, but it's gonna impact a significant number of users' experience on those three platforms, which we know are, are very widely used.
I wanted to ask, Mike, did you come across this teen default? Did your kids kind of come to you and say, "Hey, uh, my, my experience-
We should get straight into it 'cause we've got lots to discuss, and we're gonna start, Mike, by talking a bit about product defaults, and that is not a reason for our listeners to switch off.
I think they are, you know, everyone thinks about, uh, internet speech and safety as about content moderation and about, as about policy, and product defaults are, you know, obviously one of the kind of blanket ways, one of the kind of most impactful ways that you can change the way that a platform works and the way people be- behave on platforms.
Do you remember last year when Meta announced some changes to how they were doing teen defaults? We talked a bit about it on the podcast.
They essentially rolled out plans to have a new teen experience that meant that content was more suitable for teen users, users between kind of 13 and 18, and they were piloting this in the UK and the US, Australia, and Canada.
You had the Australia social media ban had been announced, but not kind of enacted.
The Online Safety Act was being enforced, and there was a big focus on the harming of children.
You also had our good friend Jonathan Haidt doing many, many interviews [laughs] in the media about his book, Anxious Generation.
And so there was this kind of cacophony of noise and pressure around child safety and particularly kind of Instagram's role in that, which has been long documented.
Well, this week Meta announced a plan to roll out that teen default to a larger audience, a more global audience, but also onto its other platforms, onto Messenger and to the main Facebook experience.
So it's not something that's got loads of attention, but it's gonna impact a significant number of users' experience on those three platforms, which we know are, are very widely used.
I wanted to ask, Mike, did you come across this teen default? Did your kids kind of come to you and say, "Hey, uh, my, my experience-
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