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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/santa-clara-county\">Santa Clara County\u003c/a> is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging the company is enabling and profiting from billions of scam advertisements circulating on its sites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The civil lawsuit, filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, claims Menlo Park-based Meta’s social media platforms carry around 15 billion scam ads daily, hurting seniors, families and small businesses, among its 3.5 billion users.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County officials said the suit, filed on behalf of all California residents, is the first of its kind to be brought in the state and the first such action by any local civil prosecutor in the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County Counsel Tony LoPresti said the company earns an estimated $7 billion in annual revenue from “fraudulent or otherwise prohibited advertisements” alone, in some cases by allegedly charging scammers a premium to post the ads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta might be a massive power broker in Silicon Valley and throughout the world, but Meta is not a company above the law,” LoPresti said during a press conference on Monday morning announcing the legal action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said with billions of scam ads on the platform, the types of scams run the gamut, including cryptocurrency scams, people impersonating celebrities or military personnel asking for money, or advertising “miracle cures to incurable diseases.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12036125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12036125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“As civil prosecutors in Silicon Valley, we can’t allow a company as influential as Meta to continue perpetrating a scheme of this magnitude to deceive and victimize consumers,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The complaint claims Meta is violating false advertising and unfair competition laws, and asks a judge to order an injunction to stop the alleged practices. It also seeks monetary restitution and asks for civil penalties to be levied against Meta, some of which could be turned over to the county to be used for further consumer protection litigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit rests heavily on internal leaked documents that were first reported by \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/\">Reuters\u003c/a> last fall. A May 2025 company internal presentation estimated that “Meta was involved in one third of all successful Internet scams in the U.S.,” the lawsuit said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county said Meta has contributed to more than $2.5 billion in losses for Californians in 2024, with seniors hit hardest. “Californians over 60 lost more than $800 million, and nationwide, older adults reported losses more than four times the average,” the county said in a statement.[aside postID=news_12082693 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/CellebriteGetty.jpg']A Meta spokesperson, in an emailed statement on Monday, said the company will fight the lawsuit. The legal action and the reporting it is largely based on distorts the company’s motives and ignores the “full range” of work done to combat scams, the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they’re not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services. We removed over 159 million scam ads last year alone, launched new tools to protect people and partnered with law enforcement around the globe to disrupt these criminals,” the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LoPresti said in an interview that the company frequently touts the work it does against scams, while it is simultaneously “putting handcuffs on the fraud prevention teams” it employs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What our complaint alleges is that they have told those fraud prevention teams that they can’t do anything that actually impacts revenue by more than 0.15% of Meta’s total overall revenue,” LoPresti said. “So essentially what they’re saying is, ‘You can do your work, we want to brag about it, but we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t impact our bottom line too much.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit alleges Meta also facilitates scam advertising “by promoting and providing special protections to supposedly ‘vetted’ business partners that make no secret of offering services to support scam advertisers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta’s own systems flag advertisements that are likely scams, but “instead of stopping those ads, the company charges scammers a premium price to run them, a practice that both facilitates and monetizes deception,” the county statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11951943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11951943 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"The Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Santa Clara County is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on behalf of all California residents over harmful scam advertisements on the company’s social media platforms. \u003ccite>(Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meta deliberately targets the most vulnerable people with scam ads, the suit said, and those who have clicked on illegitimate ads before will be shown more of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Essentially, it’s like a bully finding the weak kid on the playground and making sure that they’re getting all of the attention,” LoPresti said. “The elderly, folks of color, low-income folks are disproportionately impacted by this kind of conduct. And that’s something that we believe really has to stop.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta has faced a wave of litigation in recent years, including for allegedly employing addictive features that lead to mental health challenges, for not protecting young people and for using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models without permission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LoPresti said his office is “excited to litigate” the case and expects to be able to hold Meta accountable for its actions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t sit idly by when we know good and well that a tech giant is swindling the public to hit a revenue target,” LoPresti said. “Tech might be the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. And we benefit from it, and we celebrate that. But we can’t allow poison into that bloodstream.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/santa-clara-county\">Santa Clara County\u003c/a> is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging the company is enabling and profiting from billions of scam advertisements circulating on its sites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The civil lawsuit, filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, claims Menlo Park-based Meta’s social media platforms carry around 15 billion scam ads daily, hurting seniors, families and small businesses, among its 3.5 billion users.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County officials said the suit, filed on behalf of all California residents, is the first of its kind to be brought in the state and the first such action by any local civil prosecutor in the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County Counsel Tony LoPresti said the company earns an estimated $7 billion in annual revenue from “fraudulent or otherwise prohibited advertisements” alone, in some cases by allegedly charging scammers a premium to post the ads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta might be a massive power broker in Silicon Valley and throughout the world, but Meta is not a company above the law,” LoPresti said during a press conference on Monday morning announcing the legal action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said with billions of scam ads on the platform, the types of scams run the gamut, including cryptocurrency scams, people impersonating celebrities or military personnel asking for money, or advertising “miracle cures to incurable diseases.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12036125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12036125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“As civil prosecutors in Silicon Valley, we can’t allow a company as influential as Meta to continue perpetrating a scheme of this magnitude to deceive and victimize consumers,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The complaint claims Meta is violating false advertising and unfair competition laws, and asks a judge to order an injunction to stop the alleged practices. It also seeks monetary restitution and asks for civil penalties to be levied against Meta, some of which could be turned over to the county to be used for further consumer protection litigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit rests heavily on internal leaked documents that were first reported by \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/\">Reuters\u003c/a> last fall. A May 2025 company internal presentation estimated that “Meta was involved in one third of all successful Internet scams in the U.S.,” the lawsuit said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county said Meta has contributed to more than $2.5 billion in losses for Californians in 2024, with seniors hit hardest. “Californians over 60 lost more than $800 million, and nationwide, older adults reported losses more than four times the average,” the county said in a statement.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>A Meta spokesperson, in an emailed statement on Monday, said the company will fight the lawsuit. The legal action and the reporting it is largely based on distorts the company’s motives and ignores the “full range” of work done to combat scams, the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they’re not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services. We removed over 159 million scam ads last year alone, launched new tools to protect people and partnered with law enforcement around the globe to disrupt these criminals,” the statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LoPresti said in an interview that the company frequently touts the work it does against scams, while it is simultaneously “putting handcuffs on the fraud prevention teams” it employs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What our complaint alleges is that they have told those fraud prevention teams that they can’t do anything that actually impacts revenue by more than 0.15% of Meta’s total overall revenue,” LoPresti said. “So essentially what they’re saying is, ‘You can do your work, we want to brag about it, but we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t impact our bottom line too much.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit alleges Meta also facilitates scam advertising “by promoting and providing special protections to supposedly ‘vetted’ business partners that make no secret of offering services to support scam advertisers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta’s own systems flag advertisements that are likely scams, but “instead of stopping those ads, the company charges scammers a premium price to run them, a practice that both facilitates and monetizes deception,” the county statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11951943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11951943 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"The Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Santa Clara County is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on behalf of all California residents over harmful scam advertisements on the company’s social media platforms. \u003ccite>(Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meta deliberately targets the most vulnerable people with scam ads, the suit said, and those who have clicked on illegitimate ads before will be shown more of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Essentially, it’s like a bully finding the weak kid on the playground and making sure that they’re getting all of the attention,” LoPresti said. “The elderly, folks of color, low-income folks are disproportionately impacted by this kind of conduct. And that’s something that we believe really has to stop.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta has faced a wave of litigation in recent years, including for allegedly employing addictive features that lead to mental health challenges, for not protecting young people and for using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models without permission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LoPresti said his office is “excited to litigate” the case and expects to be able to hold Meta accountable for its actions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t sit idly by when we know good and well that a tech giant is swindling the public to hit a revenue target,” LoPresti said. “Tech might be the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. And we benefit from it, and we celebrate that. But we can’t allow poison into that bloodstream.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cb>Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, April 15, 2026\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED has obtained surveillance video of a mass use of force incident at the Central California Women’s Facility. It’s the first detailed look at the August 2024 incident that resulted in the largest disciplinary action from a single use of force event. \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://laist.com/news/politics/eric-swalwell-congressman-california-governor-race-sexual-assault-allegations-lonna-drewes\">Another woman has come forward\u003c/a> to accuse former California Congressman Eric Swalwell of sexual assault. Meanwhile, G\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">overnor Gavin Newsom is \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/14/governor-newsom-issues-proclamation-setting-special-election-for-california-congressional-district-14/\">calling a special election\u003c/a> to fill Swalwell’s congressional seat. \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An independent privacy audit of Google, Meta and Microsoft web traffic in California found the firms may be violating state privacy laws, potentially exposing themselves to significant fines.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘I thought I was going to die’: video shows mass force at California women’s prison\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Surveillance footage newly obtained by KQED sheds light on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12004368/like-a-war-zone-prison-officers-used-unprecedented-force-in-august-attack-incarcerated-women-say\">mass use-of-force incident\u003c/a> at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/facility-locator/ccwf/\">Central California Women’s Facility\u003c/a> in 2024. The incident resulted in discipline for more than 40 staff members, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and $1.9 million in payouts to some of the women injured during the incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the morning of Aug. 2, 2024, officers relocated more than 150 women to the dining hall in order to conduct a large-scale search of their cells. The women were held there for hours without access to food or medication, as tensions built and temperatures rose above 100 degrees, according to court filings. Officers deployed chemical agents, batons and physical force on dozens of incarcerated people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The surveillance footage, obtained through a public records request to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california-department-of-corrections-and-rehabilitation\"> CDCR\u003c/a>, provides the first detailed view of how the incident unfolded. CDCR has not released officers’ body-camera video or disciplinary records requested by KQED. Previously leaked footage edited and made public by a \u003ca href=\"https://hectorbravoshow.com/\">former correctional lieutenant turned YouTuber\u003c/a> provided only limited insight into the incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Angelina Hernandez, who was inside the dining hall at the time and has since been released, said watching the footage again was emotional. “I really thought I was going to die that day,” Hernandez said. “These officers are supposed to protect us, not attack us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dozens of officers file into the chow hall around 12:30 p.m. and form what appears to be a skirmish line, many holding pepper spray canisters at the ready, the footage shows. Over several minutes, more officers join the formation, growing to what appears to be 40 to 50 officers positioned across the room. While there is no audio captured on the surveillance footage, things appear tense with some of the incarcerated women gesticulating and shouting at the line of officers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kenneth Jimenez, a retired lieutenant who reviewed the footage, said officers must be facing an imminent threat in order to justify deploying force. Jimenez is familiar with use of force policy, which he taught to both peace officers and civilians across the state. “I don’t see anybody approaching in a threatening manner,” he said as he watched the video. “I don’t see anything that’s imminent,” Jimenez added that instead of using force officers could have instead restrained a small number of individuals and removed them from the scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDCR did not answer specific questions about whether the force used was excessive, but said policies were violated that day and that “corrective action” was taken.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"ArticlePage-headline\">\u003ca href=\"https://laist.com/news/politics/eric-swalwell-congressman-california-governor-race-sexual-assault-allegations-lonna-drewes\">\u003cstrong>Another woman accuses former Congressmember Eric Swalwell of sexual assault\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A California woman on Tuesday said she was raped by former Congressman \u003cspan class=\"LinkEnhancement\">\u003ca class=\"Link AnClick-LinkEnhancement\" href=\"https://apnews.com/article/congress-ethics-swalwell-california-governor-a1626c5f4dbcc16c85f4313a8d7e5464\" data-gtm-enhancement-style=\"LinkEnhancementA\">Eric Swalwell\u003c/a>\u003c/span> in 2018 and now plans to make a report to law enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lonna Drewes said during a news conference that the assault occurred at a hotel in Southern California. She said she had one glass of wine that evening and believes Swalwell drugged her before raping her. Swalwell \u003cspan class=\"LinkEnhancement\">\u003ca class=\"Link AnClick-LinkEnhancement\" href=\"https://apnews.com/article/swalwell-democrats-california-governor-campaign-allegations-congress-8b60b0c226f93c691633231053d5ddf9\" data-gtm-enhancement-style=\"LinkEnhancementA\">dropped out\u003c/a>\u003c/span> of the California governor’s race on Sunday and said he would resign from Congress this week following earlier allegations of sexual assault from a different woman. “I did not consent to any sexual activity,” Drewes said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drewes said she was working as a model and owned a fashion software company based in Beverly Hills when she met Swalwell. He offered to help her with connections to further her company and knew she had an interest in local politics. She had met him twice before the night when she says he raped her. That night, the two met at a restaurant opening and were set to attend a political event, she said. On their way to the event, Drewes said Swalwell wanted to stop back at his hotel room to get some paperwork. By the time they reached the room, she said her limbs felt heavy and she felt like she had been drugged. She said Swalwell raped her and later choked her, causing her to lose consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attorney Sara Azari released a statement Tuesday on Swalwell’s behalf saying he “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him.” She pledged to “pursue every available legal remedy against those responsible for orchestrating this reprehensible campaign of lies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes on the same day that \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/swalwell-resigning-from-congress-after-sexual-assault-accusations\">Swalwell resigned from Congress.\u003c/a> Governor Gavin Newsom has called \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/14/governor-newsom-issues-proclamation-setting-special-election-for-california-congressional-district-14/\">a special election for August 18\u003c/a>, to fill the remainder of Swalwell’s term.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"routes-Site-routes-Post-Title-__Title__title\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12079887/what-is-the-point-of-californias-privacy-laws-if-big-tech-ignores-them\">\u003cstrong>What is the point of California’s privacy laws if Big Tech ignores them?\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>An independent review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">Microsoft, Meta and Google\u003c/a> web traffic in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> in March found the tech companies may have violated state regulations around internet privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">audit\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://webxray.ai/\">webXray\u003c/a>, also said that nearly 200 online advertising services ignored “legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals” around data sharing, along with more than half of nearly 7,000 websites in California, despite user requests to opt-out of cookie tracking, the most visible opt-out mechanism the laws require. This is despite the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11792899/the-california-consumer-privacy-act-mandates-what-again-exactly\">California Consumer Privacy Act\u003c/a>, as expanded by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11801063/get-ready-for-another-consumer-privacy-initiative-in-california#:~:text=Listen,to%20the%20Attorney%20General's%20Office.\"> California Privacy Rights Act\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844163/proposition-24-californians-say-yes-to-expanding-on-nations-toughest-data-privacy-law\"> other state privacy legislation\u003c/a>, enforced by both the state attorney general’s office and the California Privacy Protection Agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our findings reveal major technology companies simply ignore globally defined opt-out signals, raising the spectre of industrial-scale non-compliance with California requirements,” the \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">report’s\u003c/a> website states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Businesses that sell or share your personal information are legally required to honor the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa/gpc\">Global Privacy Control\u003c/a>, a “stop selling or sharing my data” switch available on web browsers, or as a browser extension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company that conducted the audit, webXray, was founded by Timothy Libert, a privacy expert who led cookie policy and compliance at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> offices in Sunnyvale from 2021 to 2023. Libert spent 15 years in academia studying the topic and worked as a consultant for national and state regulators before his time at Google.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cb>Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, April 15, 2026\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED has obtained surveillance video of a mass use of force incident at the Central California Women’s Facility. It’s the first detailed look at the August 2024 incident that resulted in the largest disciplinary action from a single use of force event. \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://laist.com/news/politics/eric-swalwell-congressman-california-governor-race-sexual-assault-allegations-lonna-drewes\">Another woman has come forward\u003c/a> to accuse former California Congressman Eric Swalwell of sexual assault. Meanwhile, G\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">overnor Gavin Newsom is \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/14/governor-newsom-issues-proclamation-setting-special-election-for-california-congressional-district-14/\">calling a special election\u003c/a> to fill Swalwell’s congressional seat. \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An independent privacy audit of Google, Meta and Microsoft web traffic in California found the firms may be violating state privacy laws, potentially exposing themselves to significant fines.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘I thought I was going to die’: video shows mass force at California women’s prison\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Surveillance footage newly obtained by KQED sheds light on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12004368/like-a-war-zone-prison-officers-used-unprecedented-force-in-august-attack-incarcerated-women-say\">mass use-of-force incident\u003c/a> at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/facility-locator/ccwf/\">Central California Women’s Facility\u003c/a> in 2024. The incident resulted in discipline for more than 40 staff members, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and $1.9 million in payouts to some of the women injured during the incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the morning of Aug. 2, 2024, officers relocated more than 150 women to the dining hall in order to conduct a large-scale search of their cells. The women were held there for hours without access to food or medication, as tensions built and temperatures rose above 100 degrees, according to court filings. Officers deployed chemical agents, batons and physical force on dozens of incarcerated people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The surveillance footage, obtained through a public records request to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california-department-of-corrections-and-rehabilitation\"> CDCR\u003c/a>, provides the first detailed view of how the incident unfolded. CDCR has not released officers’ body-camera video or disciplinary records requested by KQED. Previously leaked footage edited and made public by a \u003ca href=\"https://hectorbravoshow.com/\">former correctional lieutenant turned YouTuber\u003c/a> provided only limited insight into the incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Angelina Hernandez, who was inside the dining hall at the time and has since been released, said watching the footage again was emotional. “I really thought I was going to die that day,” Hernandez said. “These officers are supposed to protect us, not attack us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dozens of officers file into the chow hall around 12:30 p.m. and form what appears to be a skirmish line, many holding pepper spray canisters at the ready, the footage shows. Over several minutes, more officers join the formation, growing to what appears to be 40 to 50 officers positioned across the room. While there is no audio captured on the surveillance footage, things appear tense with some of the incarcerated women gesticulating and shouting at the line of officers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kenneth Jimenez, a retired lieutenant who reviewed the footage, said officers must be facing an imminent threat in order to justify deploying force. Jimenez is familiar with use of force policy, which he taught to both peace officers and civilians across the state. “I don’t see anybody approaching in a threatening manner,” he said as he watched the video. “I don’t see anything that’s imminent,” Jimenez added that instead of using force officers could have instead restrained a small number of individuals and removed them from the scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CDCR did not answer specific questions about whether the force used was excessive, but said policies were violated that day and that “corrective action” was taken.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"ArticlePage-headline\">\u003ca href=\"https://laist.com/news/politics/eric-swalwell-congressman-california-governor-race-sexual-assault-allegations-lonna-drewes\">\u003cstrong>Another woman accuses former Congressmember Eric Swalwell of sexual assault\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A California woman on Tuesday said she was raped by former Congressman \u003cspan class=\"LinkEnhancement\">\u003ca class=\"Link AnClick-LinkEnhancement\" href=\"https://apnews.com/article/congress-ethics-swalwell-california-governor-a1626c5f4dbcc16c85f4313a8d7e5464\" data-gtm-enhancement-style=\"LinkEnhancementA\">Eric Swalwell\u003c/a>\u003c/span> in 2018 and now plans to make a report to law enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lonna Drewes said during a news conference that the assault occurred at a hotel in Southern California. She said she had one glass of wine that evening and believes Swalwell drugged her before raping her. Swalwell \u003cspan class=\"LinkEnhancement\">\u003ca class=\"Link AnClick-LinkEnhancement\" href=\"https://apnews.com/article/swalwell-democrats-california-governor-campaign-allegations-congress-8b60b0c226f93c691633231053d5ddf9\" data-gtm-enhancement-style=\"LinkEnhancementA\">dropped out\u003c/a>\u003c/span> of the California governor’s race on Sunday and said he would resign from Congress this week following earlier allegations of sexual assault from a different woman. “I did not consent to any sexual activity,” Drewes said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drewes said she was working as a model and owned a fashion software company based in Beverly Hills when she met Swalwell. He offered to help her with connections to further her company and knew she had an interest in local politics. She had met him twice before the night when she says he raped her. That night, the two met at a restaurant opening and were set to attend a political event, she said. On their way to the event, Drewes said Swalwell wanted to stop back at his hotel room to get some paperwork. By the time they reached the room, she said her limbs felt heavy and she felt like she had been drugged. She said Swalwell raped her and later choked her, causing her to lose consciousness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attorney Sara Azari released a statement Tuesday on Swalwell’s behalf saying he “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him.” She pledged to “pursue every available legal remedy against those responsible for orchestrating this reprehensible campaign of lies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes on the same day that \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/swalwell-resigning-from-congress-after-sexual-assault-accusations\">Swalwell resigned from Congress.\u003c/a> Governor Gavin Newsom has called \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/14/governor-newsom-issues-proclamation-setting-special-election-for-california-congressional-district-14/\">a special election for August 18\u003c/a>, to fill the remainder of Swalwell’s term.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"routes-Site-routes-Post-Title-__Title__title\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12079887/what-is-the-point-of-californias-privacy-laws-if-big-tech-ignores-them\">\u003cstrong>What is the point of California’s privacy laws if Big Tech ignores them?\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>An independent review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">Microsoft, Meta and Google\u003c/a> web traffic in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> in March found the tech companies may have violated state regulations around internet privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">audit\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://webxray.ai/\">webXray\u003c/a>, also said that nearly 200 online advertising services ignored “legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals” around data sharing, along with more than half of nearly 7,000 websites in California, despite user requests to opt-out of cookie tracking, the most visible opt-out mechanism the laws require. This is despite the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11792899/the-california-consumer-privacy-act-mandates-what-again-exactly\">California Consumer Privacy Act\u003c/a>, as expanded by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11801063/get-ready-for-another-consumer-privacy-initiative-in-california#:~:text=Listen,to%20the%20Attorney%20General's%20Office.\"> California Privacy Rights Act\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844163/proposition-24-californians-say-yes-to-expanding-on-nations-toughest-data-privacy-law\"> other state privacy legislation\u003c/a>, enforced by both the state attorney general’s office and the California Privacy Protection Agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our findings reveal major technology companies simply ignore globally defined opt-out signals, raising the spectre of industrial-scale non-compliance with California requirements,” the \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">report’s\u003c/a> website states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Businesses that sell or share your personal information are legally required to honor the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa/gpc\">Global Privacy Control\u003c/a>, a “stop selling or sharing my data” switch available on web browsers, or as a browser extension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company that conducted the audit, webXray, was founded by Timothy Libert, a privacy expert who led cookie policy and compliance at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> offices in Sunnyvale from 2021 to 2023. Libert spent 15 years in academia studying the topic and worked as a consultant for national and state regulators before his time at Google.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "save-or-scroll-looksmaxxing-ai-fruit-love-island-bts-arirang-and-meta-lawsuits",
"title": "Save or Scroll: Looksmaxxing, AI Fruit Love Island, BTS Arirang, and Meta Lawsuits",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a spring installment of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Morgan teams up with culture journalist Steffi Cao to dig into the stories they can’t stop thinking about. From \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">looksmaxxing to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AI Fruit Love Island, BTS’ new album, and Meta losing a landmark series of lawsuits, they’ve got a lot to discuss. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll is our series where we team up with guests for a rapid-fire roundup of internet trends that are filling our feeds right now. At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4630070510\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://stefficao.substack.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steffi Cao\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, culture journalist \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://stefficao.substack.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More from Steffi Cao\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Substack\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gq.com/story/inside-claviculars-thirsty-tour-of-new-york-city\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Inside Clavicular’s Thirsty Tour of New York City \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Kieran Press-Reynolds, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GQ\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-gen-z-gym-culture-steroids-are-often-a-gateway-drug-to-the-alt-right/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Steroids Are Now Turning Young Men into Dangerous Incels\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Steffi Cao, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Daily Beast\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91519147/fruit-love-island-tiktok-most-popular-ai-generated-series-now-facing-trouble-in-paradise\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Fruit Love Island’ is TikTok’s most popular AI-generated series. It’s now facing trouble in paradise \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Jude Cramer, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/theres-something-very-dark-about-a-lot-of-those-viral-ai-fruit-videos/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s Something Very Dark About a Lot of Those Viral AI Fruit Videos \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Kat Tenbarge, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wired \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-decides-if-bts-album-arirang-is-korean-enough-op-ed\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who Decides If BTS’s Album ‘Arirang’ is ‘Korean Enough’? \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Jiye Kim, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Teen Vogue \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/bts-arirang-album-netflix-swim-comeback-concert-2026.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BTS’s Arirang comeback was supposed to be a triumph. What happened?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nadira Goffe, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://19thnews.org/2026/03/social-media-addiction-trial-meta-youtube/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meta and YouTube ordered to pay $3 million to young woman in social media addiction trial\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jasmine Mithani, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 19th\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-the-verdict-against-meta-and-google-says-about-the-way-we-live-now\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What the Verdict Against Meta and Google Says About the Way We Live Now\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jeannie Suk Gersen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY\">The Truth About the Social Media Addiction Trial\u003c/a> — Taylor Lorenz, \u003ci>Free Speech Friday \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, it’s Morgan. We just celebrated the show’s first birthday. That’s right, Close All Tabs is a Pisces. Want to celebrate with us? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends about us too. Okay, let’s get to the episode.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey guys, welcome to Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Except today, we aren’t opening any tabs. Instead, we’re doing another Save or Scroll. We’ve done a few of these now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Occasionally, while scrolling, I come across a truly wild post, but it might not make sense to spend an entire episode on it. Maybe I do a little digging and it turns out that the lore behind it just isn’t compelling enough to justify a deep dive, but I’m still dying to talk about it. And this is the beauty of Save or Scroll, the game where a guest comes to the show and we trade stories from the internet that we’re dying to talk about. Today, we have the one and only Steffi Cao. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for having me, Morgan. I’m so excited. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Steffi, tell us about yourself. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hi everyone, I’m Steffi, I am a culture journalist and Slate’s newest dating advice columnist for Unhinged. You can find my writing everywhere from The Atlantic, to Rolling Stone, to The Guardian, to Slate now, so I’m very excited to share all my tabs and work in today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so let’s talk about the rules of Save or Scroll. Save, as in when you see a post on TikTok or Instagram or X and you bookmark it, add it to your save folders or if you’re me, drop it in notes app and hope that you’ll remember it’s there. Basically, you’re holding onto the story because you know you’ll want to dig into it more. And scroll, as you think about it and then move on. It disappears into the digital ether.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Steffi and I have each brought some stories that we can’t stop thinking about, and we’re gonna go back and forth to decide if they’re worth a deep dive on the show. So if we decide to scroll, it means we’ve talked about it, we’re moving on. And if we save, it means that we might hold onto the idea for a future episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Steffi, please tell us about looksmaxxing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the past few years, looksmaxxing is the subculture of young men primarily who are seeking guidance from other men in terms of how to gamify their looks to become super, super hot. The essence of looksmaxxing is basically ‘the hotter I can be, the better my life will be around other men.’ And the pinnacle of these content creators currently is a man named Clavicular of collarbone fame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s a 20-year-old white man who has a very soft elfin face and a Dorito-shaped body and has really been associated with a lot of, like, Nazi ideology, has been recently arrested for inciting a fight between two women, allegedly and also allegedly shooting an alligator in Florida. He was kicked out of Las Vegas, I believe, and has become this sort of lightning rod for this entire culture of all these men wanting to get hotter and be hotter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah and Clavicular first went viral for not only his extensive skin care and workout routine, but for also saying that he microdoses meth and would hit his face with a hammer to get a more, I guess, angular jawline. What a man. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What a guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What a character. Clavicular is so fascinating to me because his political stances are indecipherable. He has gone on some more right-leaning podcasts, and when they try to get him to be kind of transphobic, he said… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clavicular in audio clip]\u003cbr>\nI did a podcast with Michael Knowles the other day and he’s sitting here saying like and getting all mad about transgenders and I’m like bro that’s one more person a mog you know what I mean so like I don’t get too I don’t get too upset when people go trans and all that shit. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s just another person to mog. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How would you describe mogging? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mogging, I think, is the essence of being hotter than somebody else. So if you’ve mogged them, it’s like you’ve shown them up in some way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of Clavicular on the Adam Friedland Show] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clavicular: That’s the goal of the game, right, is to mog other people, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adam: Tell the boomer cells about what that is. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clavicular: So, mogging is essentially just, you know, outperforming them, looking better than them, yeah and just sort of dominating, right. It came from something called AMOG, which was alpha male of the group, then it was shortened to just mog, so that’s kind of like the term we use. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the language has become like a bigger than itself sort of phenomenon where, you know, maxxing and mogging have started from this internal community and then now becomes sort of like general ironic gobbledygook for everybody. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s so interesting too, because the whole looksmaxxing thing has become like the peak Manosphere content. All the allegedly straight boys are really into doing all this to impress other men. It doesn’t seem like they actually do this in any way to appeal to women. And like, I’ve seen a lot of like gay men point out, this is literally gay male culture, what they’re doing, the peacocking, trying to show each other up and like only seek validation from other men, which is from a gender perspective, I’m like, what’s going on here? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels like horseshoe theory a little bit. They are doing all of these performative things that come right back to a drag of what a straight man is. It’s like it’s heterosexual drag. Like you’re trying to, you know, build up your face a certain way, you’re trying to mog other straight men, like that’s drag, honey. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like that’s gender performance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">100% Yeah, I mean, self-improvement leans so well into fascist ideology because a lot of it is predicated on this idea that you can earn your way into something better, which is exactly what looksmaxxing is, right? You can gamify your looks. Like, If you’re not hot now, all you need to do is do all these steps and gain more points, more aura points, until you have achieved this thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is exactly why in Nazi Germany you see a lot of propaganda being espoused about the strongman. That was a huge beauty standard at that point in Hitler’s Germany, was specifically this idea of a man who is super jacked and is super like, is mogged, really, and I have no other word for it really. It’s just like they really..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A mogged man has always been this cultural fascination and in many ways a mogged woman, obviously. Um, has been a huge part of, uh, fascist ideology for a long time. You know, think about all these essays about why Republican women all look the same and they have this specific look about them. And it has a lot to do with this culture of self-improvement and making all these alterations to yourself to try and earn your way or like bootstrap your way into beauty and therefore access and power and all of these things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Okay, well, looksmaxxing, the big thing of the year right now, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m saving it because I think there’s going to be developments. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No, yeah, there are going to be new words that have never been said before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s going be crazy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But looks maxed as a trend, I think we’re saving. After the break, a new bombshell enters the villa. Unfortunately, she’s AI generated and also made of fruit. Steffi and I are going to explain all of the drama around AI Fruit Love Island. Stick around. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have a story for you now. Are you familiar with AI Fruit Love Island? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, am I! Oh my god, I feel like it came out of nowhere and then it’s sudden, it’s like omnipresent now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, for the uninitiated, AI Fruit Love Island was this interactive AI-slop parody of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Love Island\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with sexy anthropomorphized fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from AI Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Welcome Back to Fruit Love Island. Today we’ve got a steamy challenge and after over 370,000 viewer votes, our bombshells have officially hit the villa. All right ladies let’s get this started. You’ll be kissed one by each guy and after each kiss you rate it. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so that is one of the episodes of Fruit Love Island. What was happening in that clip? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, it’s basically just a real \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Love Island\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> challenge, but done with fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they have human bodies, um, but their heads are fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are all like, obviously done by AI. The colors are highly saturated. It’s super bright, super like in your face. And then a grape man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and, uh, board shorts, like comes up and kisses the fruit ladies blindfolded. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from AI Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Grapenzo, you’re up first. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Contestant: That was hot, an 8.5. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You see all these badly done reactions in the background of these AI fruit women laughing and sort of being like, ha ha ha, this is crazy. So it just is like a \u003cem>Love Island\u003c/em> episode, but with fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for context, this TikTok account kind of came out of nowhere, AICinema021, and they gained about 3.1 million followers in like a week and a half. And now there are so many copycat accounts. The characters include Limeyra, the lime, Bananito, the banana who has abs and is always shirtless, Strawberrina, the strawberry, Coconick, the sexy coconut. And yeah, it’s not good. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The animation and voices are all stilted. There’s zero consistency. It’s pure slop. So viewers gave storyline feedback via Google Form and voted for their faves in the comments. And this account was getting crazy numbers, like 20 million views per episode at its peak and just churning out new episodes every day. I feel like it used to be kind of embarrassing to enjoy this kind of content, but then you had Zara Larsson and Joe Jonas being like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait for the next episode.’ Like major celebrities. But yeah, what’s your like initial gut reaction here? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it makes sense why this thing is taken off, because even though young people online want to act like only boomers love watching AI slop, the fact is our brains are primed to watch AI slop. We have all these deep fried memes and internet humor is so self-referential, but it removes a lot of these barriers in our heads of consuming something like this that really feels as though, like, okay, maybe, um, what could be embarrassing previously could be ironically fun now. I love it because it’s fascinating to see how excited people get about it. But like, is the content good? No, it’s trash, but I don’t think it’s trying to be good. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Well, have you been following the great AI Fruit Love Island crash out… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have not. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…that happened over the weekend? Okay. So this account literally gained millions and millions of followers, three million followers in like a week and a half, which is insane. Like there are human creators who grind for years to get a third of that. But, you know, this account was able to just churn out content so fast and people were invested. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So basically, people were criticizing the account for being AI slop and criticizing viewers for being slop consumers. And the creator did not respond well. In TikTok comments, they complained about how hard it was to make this content and basically implied that like viewers were ungrateful. A real hilarious irony where they were like, it’s really hard because I have to prompt so many times and the AI sometimes messes up and I have to redo it and then I have edit it together. And it sometimes takes me like three hours to make one of these videos. And it’s like, yeah, well… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagine how long it must take to film a real TV episode? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s so funny that they’re like, this is so hard, even like having to prompt a generator to be like, and now make Strawberrina kiss the kiwi man is like too much effort. So then their video started getting removed. The creator claimed that it was part of a mass reporting campaign and started crashing onto their story. So this was the first one…they were, I guess, sick of it, right? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were like, “This is it. I’m sick of all of you.” They were getting criticized for like wasting water basically and people were pointing out like, hey, this is like really sh*tty that you’re kind of encouraging this consumption. So they were posting like, “Was a good run, didn’t expect any of this, but here we are from being a nobody to being cancelled. I guess I’ll take it. People hate to see people win,”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s awesome! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…with screenshots from like their episodes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I’m so glad y’all got what you wanted. Saving the planet three gallons of water at a time, truly inspirational. It’s like, f*ck all y’all, you jealous motherf*ckers, save the planet, OMG, water, OMG. I love water, clean water, please clean water. What y’ all sound like.”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s hilarious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Thanks for 3 million followers though. Wow, I guess some might like it.” Then they posted one final one, basically saying like, this series is over, this is it, with Bananito, a fan favorite, unfortunately, the sexy banana that is never wearing a shirt. Um, and basically they said, “All right, f*ck all you b*tches, no more Fruit Love Island. Since people are so obsessed with it, all my videos banned, I make no money. I guess I am being targeted because no other AI account is getting f*cked. Y’all heard it from Bananito himself. Bye.”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bye. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s just really funny because they also got mad that other like copycat AI accounts were like copying their theme, which is a real like, so many layers between like, being mad about the copycats and then being like suddenly like creative integrity matters basically. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then being mad at like the effort it took to make these videos. The layers of complete unawareness just go so deep. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter] It’s one of those things where I’m like, oh, of course, this is where we are. People are so fixated on this idea of it’s fine until it’s me because passive consumption is just so self-centric, you’re only thinking about yourself. So of course this person’s mad that other people are stealing their AI fruit slop content without contributing to the AI slop database that can then pull out more content. Okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like a content self-eating snake, you know? But I will say, there is one glimmer of hope, despite how many people were obsessed with this slop. I would say there’s an equal faction of people who are really into human-made content. And so this inspired several Fruit Love Island non-AI copycats,. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With real fruit? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…which I will show you now, which is really beautiful. I love that people are doing this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Welcome to episode one of Fruit Love Island, that’s not AI. I’ve made sure to gather the juiciest of drama in the villa in the past day. Now let’s see what’s happened. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Contestant: I’m here to break hearts, not to fall in love. Hopefully these guys don’t get too attached. Or I don’t. I won’t though. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s basically a similar idea, but it’s not really animated so much as like, there are these photoshopped pictures of like people, human bodies with fruits for heads. It’s a human being that made this and it’s not as refined, but they did get voice actors on Discord to like volunteer their voices and voice all of this. And so I’m just like really encouraged by the fact that this has kind of blown up this non-AI Fruit Love Island. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that’s beautiful. I think we need to reject modernity and embrace tradition in a lot of ways, because we already had Annoying Orange. We need to bring back the original recipes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I know. And like Annoying Orange,I hated that content. I didn’t dread it. But you know what? A human being made it.\u003cbr>\n\u003cb>\u003cbr>\nSteffi Cao: \u003c/b>A human-being made it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>So AI Fruit Love Island, do we save or do we scroll?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gonna scroll on it, but I defer to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m going to scroll on it too. I think it had a good run. I don’t think we need more of it. I think the crash out was beautiful and hilarious and a real internet moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Perfect irony. It’s truly, like, perfect. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tell us about this next story you brought. What’s going on with BTS’ new album? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of BTS music] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Swim swim, \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is how it all begins\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Swim, swim\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just wanna dive…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BTS was away in the military for four years, and the K-pop group, who was arguably one of the biggest acts in the industry and has been for many years, returned with an album called Arirang, and it was predominantly sung in English, and because of that, as well as the fact that it was a different sound from what they’ve previously put out in the past, it was, I think, personally sonically more mixed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of BTS music] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Watch this, watch this, \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Beat going hooligan. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pop out, we actin’ a fool again \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It became very controversial. It didn’t also help that when they did their first live performance in Seoul after the fact, there were a lot of statistics reported about how many people actually attended. They shut down a very busy intersection in Seoul saying that 300,000 people were expected to show up. Korean officials, some of them said that as low as 42,000 showed up and there were adverse impacts from store owners who expected a lot of influx but didn’t get that. And so now there’s this huge debate happening about this album, what it means for K-pop in the industry and like how things have shifted, et cetera. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think the fandom has aged out of, like, acting like fans? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cem>[Laughter] \u003c/em>I think that the industry has shifted a lot, and what a fan should act like has changed with it. Because I think in the past, the eternal struggle of a BTS ARMY was trying to convince people that K-pop was a serious art form, that it wasn’t just some silly thing that teen girls listened to, that it was corporate slop pop music, that there were a lot of uphill battles, I think, for a K-Pop fan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think now, over the past four years, you’ve seen a lot more Western embrace of K-pop as a serious art form, as a legitimate cultural export, and not like a niche subculture. So I think that with “K-Pop Demon Hunters”, you have Blackpink headlining Coachella, you had KATSEYE at Lollapalooza, you had all these bigger acts coming out of a Korean system that I think is legitimized in a different way. And so I think that BTS ARMY doesn’t have to convince anyone anymore that BTS is legit. It has shifted this fan identity of like, okay, well, now what? And now what happens?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, you mentioned that like the entire album is sang in English or like all the lyrics are mostly in English, which is interesting because Arirang is a really culturally important folk song in Korea with a lot of history behind it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Arirang sung in Korean from Youtube user @Miss_Taex] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think people expected a little bit more of that cultural representation with this album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I think BTS has also throughout their career really emphasized their Korean-ness, especially because they tend to sample a lot of traditional Korean music, a lot of Korean culture comes into play into their performances. And so I think that it was disappointing for a lot fans to open up this album and hear Teddy Swims in the song. Right? They end on a country song, which is like, possibly the most American form of music that we associate in mainstream culture. We don’t associate country music with Korea. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, right. And it’s a hard thing to follow “K-Pop Demon Hunters.” Just like the way that that movie was such a cultural moment and how it introduced so many people to Korean folklore and Korean culture and Korean language. That was a movie that was in English, but a lot of the songs were in Korean. And a lot people who have never spoken Korean learned those songs. And so it’s interesting that BTS wouldn’t see that and like kind of seize the moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, 100%. I think that it’s frustrating as a fan to feel like the whole reason that you fell so deeply in love with this group has suddenly shifted under your feet and that the intention of the group’s project didn’t align with where you thought they were going to go. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Okay, well, BTS’s new album, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think. I’m going to personally scroll on it, but I think that there’s a lot to talk about in terms of like Asian artistry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a lot to keep an eye on, but personally, don’t come for me, ARMY. I didn’t like the album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me either. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I’m gonna scroll on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was just bored. I was bored. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m in ARMY. I’m in ARMY-da. And I got the tickets. Any ARMY that wants to come for me and I will see you at MetLife. I’ve got the tickets. And what now? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But you can be disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I’m disappointed in the album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re allowed to be disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you’re allowed to scroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I am allowed to scroll on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, last story for today. The Meta lawsuits. Okay, so Meta faced two separate lawsuits: one in California over social media addiction and one in New Mexico for child safety. The one in California took place in LA and it centered around this 20 year-old woman who said that she became addicted to YouTube and Instagram as a child. And that that greatly affected her mental health.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Snapchat and TikTok were also both defendants, but they settled before it went to court. And a jury in LA found Google and Meta both negligent because the design of their apps encourages infinite scrolling. And the companies didn’t warn users about the dangers of that. So the plaintiff’s lawyer said that both Meta and Google intentionally target kids and prioritize profit over safety. \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\nThe jury concluded that Meta is liable for $4.2 million in damages, and Google is liable for $1.8 million. And then for the case in New Mexico, the state sued Meta over child safety issues. Former employees testified that underage users were shown sexualized content on Instagram and were exposed to predators. And during the court proceedings, they said that Meta’s decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger blocked access to evidence of predators grooming minors. And basically, this is the first time that New Mexico, as a state, was able to successfully sue Meta. So now Meta was ordered to pay $375 million.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So these lawsuits are being celebrated as huge wins for child safety and kind of taking down these evil tech companies. But I’m kind of skeptical of big companies like Meta and Google actually changing their practices. And whenever I hear like child safety social media lawsuit or like child safety and social media in the same sentence, I’m like, everyone wants kids to be safe. Everyone wants to protect the kids. No one wants to expose kids to predators or inappropriate content. But alarm bells are going off in my head where I’m, like, will they be using this to justify more surveillance and more censorship and more practices like age verification, which we’ve covered a lot on this show. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it makes sense that there’s a lot of cynicism around these child safety lawsuits because what we’ve seen over our careers is that every time there has been one of these landmark lawsuits, it’s like, what is it actually put into practice? People have been concerned about this topic for many, many years, but it feels like the people who are in Congress still miss the mark on the concept of social media as itself. We’ve seen endless clips of Congress people essentially asking Mark Zuckerberg for tech help during Senate hearings. Yeah. So it makes sense that this verdict, even though it’s being lauded as a huge case, I’m not convinced on it either. We’ve seen Meta pay up a lot in the past, and it hasn’t seemed to really shift the needle at all. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s like, if anything, the practices don’t change. Kids aren’t necessarily safer. And everyone else is a little bit more surveilled and censored, like, with the current wave of age verification requirements, like, sweeping any internet platform whatsoever, where you have to put in your ID to continue using Spotify in some countries and I really distrust that. And, I do kind of worry that like any kind of trying to like ensure child safety on social media will just be used to justify more age verification laws. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, 100%. I think that the solution being trusting big tech to manage more of our data and requests that we give up more of privacy is like, it makes a lot of sense as people who’ve grown up online and we’ve seen this play before. It does, I think, breed more of a culture of surveillance.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think also the problem with this lawsuit is that like, it’s not a silver bullet. Like this is a multi-pronged problem where it’s like a part of it is having adults be smarter about their tech use and teaching their kids to critically analyze the content they’re consuming day in and day out. It’s a lot on the education system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s on providing structural support for young kids to have more time offline to build all these social skills that when you are isolated and just on your feed even though it can be very fun and exciting to be on Tumblr as a 16-year-old, freewheeling it online, you still need an infrastructure behind you to teach you all these skills that you don’t really get when you are online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s like a multi-pronged problem. It really is on every adult, regardless of where you stand, if you have kids or not, to try and train yourself to be better about your own skillset, because they’re kids, they’re just imitating whatever resource is there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, and it’s like, Taylor Lorenz on her Free Speech Friday series pointed out that a lot of kids do still, you still need to let them have agency online in some capacity and just like, you know, a lot kids do rely on these online resources to access information about sex ed or find queer community when they don’t have that in real life and to potentially silo them further and take that away could actually endanger kids. Okay, the child safety lawsuits with Meta and Google, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like we’re going to have to save it because this is going to continue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, It’s an evergreen save. This is just collecting more and more tabs every day. Thank you so much for joining us, Steffi. Where can people follow your work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for having me, Morgan. You can check me out on Instagram at Steffi Cao, S-T-E-F-F-I-C-A-O, and my sub-stack, It’s Steffi. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Perfect, thanks so much. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it’s reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. Our team includes producer, Maya Cueva. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts. Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a spring installment of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Morgan teams up with culture journalist Steffi Cao to dig into the stories they can’t stop thinking about. From \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">looksmaxxing to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AI Fruit Love Island, BTS’ new album, and Meta losing a landmark series of lawsuits, they’ve got a lot to discuss. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Save or Scroll is our series where we team up with guests for a rapid-fire roundup of internet trends that are filling our feeds right now. At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4630070510\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://stefficao.substack.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steffi Cao\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, culture journalist \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://stefficao.substack.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More from Steffi Cao\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Substack\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gq.com/story/inside-claviculars-thirsty-tour-of-new-york-city\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Inside Clavicular’s Thirsty Tour of New York City \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Kieran Press-Reynolds, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GQ\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-gen-z-gym-culture-steroids-are-often-a-gateway-drug-to-the-alt-right/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Steroids Are Now Turning Young Men into Dangerous Incels\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Steffi Cao, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Daily Beast\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91519147/fruit-love-island-tiktok-most-popular-ai-generated-series-now-facing-trouble-in-paradise\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Fruit Love Island’ is TikTok’s most popular AI-generated series. It’s now facing trouble in paradise \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Jude Cramer, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/theres-something-very-dark-about-a-lot-of-those-viral-ai-fruit-videos/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s Something Very Dark About a Lot of Those Viral AI Fruit Videos \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Kat Tenbarge, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wired \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-decides-if-bts-album-arirang-is-korean-enough-op-ed\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Who Decides If BTS’s Album ‘Arirang’ is ‘Korean Enough’? \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Jiye Kim, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Teen Vogue \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/bts-arirang-album-netflix-swim-comeback-concert-2026.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BTS’s Arirang comeback was supposed to be a triumph. What happened?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nadira Goffe, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slate \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://19thnews.org/2026/03/social-media-addiction-trial-meta-youtube/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meta and YouTube ordered to pay $3 million to young woman in social media addiction trial\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jasmine Mithani, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The 19th\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-the-verdict-against-meta-and-google-says-about-the-way-we-live-now\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What the Verdict Against Meta and Google Says About the Way We Live Now\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jeannie Suk Gersen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY\">The Truth About the Social Media Addiction Trial\u003c/a> — Taylor Lorenz, \u003ci>Free Speech Friday \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, it’s Morgan. We just celebrated the show’s first birthday. That’s right, Close All Tabs is a Pisces. Want to celebrate with us? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends about us too. Okay, let’s get to the episode.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey guys, welcome to Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Except today, we aren’t opening any tabs. Instead, we’re doing another Save or Scroll. We’ve done a few of these now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Occasionally, while scrolling, I come across a truly wild post, but it might not make sense to spend an entire episode on it. Maybe I do a little digging and it turns out that the lore behind it just isn’t compelling enough to justify a deep dive, but I’m still dying to talk about it. And this is the beauty of Save or Scroll, the game where a guest comes to the show and we trade stories from the internet that we’re dying to talk about. Today, we have the one and only Steffi Cao. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for having me, Morgan. I’m so excited. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Steffi, tell us about yourself. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hi everyone, I’m Steffi, I am a culture journalist and Slate’s newest dating advice columnist for Unhinged. You can find my writing everywhere from The Atlantic, to Rolling Stone, to The Guardian, to Slate now, so I’m very excited to share all my tabs and work in today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so let’s talk about the rules of Save or Scroll. Save, as in when you see a post on TikTok or Instagram or X and you bookmark it, add it to your save folders or if you’re me, drop it in notes app and hope that you’ll remember it’s there. Basically, you’re holding onto the story because you know you’ll want to dig into it more. And scroll, as you think about it and then move on. It disappears into the digital ether.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Steffi and I have each brought some stories that we can’t stop thinking about, and we’re gonna go back and forth to decide if they’re worth a deep dive on the show. So if we decide to scroll, it means we’ve talked about it, we’re moving on. And if we save, it means that we might hold onto the idea for a future episode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, Steffi, please tell us about looksmaxxing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the past few years, looksmaxxing is the subculture of young men primarily who are seeking guidance from other men in terms of how to gamify their looks to become super, super hot. The essence of looksmaxxing is basically ‘the hotter I can be, the better my life will be around other men.’ And the pinnacle of these content creators currently is a man named Clavicular of collarbone fame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s a 20-year-old white man who has a very soft elfin face and a Dorito-shaped body and has really been associated with a lot of, like, Nazi ideology, has been recently arrested for inciting a fight between two women, allegedly and also allegedly shooting an alligator in Florida. He was kicked out of Las Vegas, I believe, and has become this sort of lightning rod for this entire culture of all these men wanting to get hotter and be hotter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah and Clavicular first went viral for not only his extensive skin care and workout routine, but for also saying that he microdoses meth and would hit his face with a hammer to get a more, I guess, angular jawline. What a man. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What a guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What a character. Clavicular is so fascinating to me because his political stances are indecipherable. He has gone on some more right-leaning podcasts, and when they try to get him to be kind of transphobic, he said… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clavicular in audio clip]\u003cbr>\nI did a podcast with Michael Knowles the other day and he’s sitting here saying like and getting all mad about transgenders and I’m like bro that’s one more person a mog you know what I mean so like I don’t get too I don’t get too upset when people go trans and all that shit. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s just another person to mog. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How would you describe mogging? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mogging, I think, is the essence of being hotter than somebody else. So if you’ve mogged them, it’s like you’ve shown them up in some way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of Clavicular on the Adam Friedland Show] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clavicular: That’s the goal of the game, right, is to mog other people, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adam: Tell the boomer cells about what that is. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clavicular: So, mogging is essentially just, you know, outperforming them, looking better than them, yeah and just sort of dominating, right. It came from something called AMOG, which was alpha male of the group, then it was shortened to just mog, so that’s kind of like the term we use. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the language has become like a bigger than itself sort of phenomenon where, you know, maxxing and mogging have started from this internal community and then now becomes sort of like general ironic gobbledygook for everybody. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s so interesting too, because the whole looksmaxxing thing has become like the peak Manosphere content. All the allegedly straight boys are really into doing all this to impress other men. It doesn’t seem like they actually do this in any way to appeal to women. And like, I’ve seen a lot of like gay men point out, this is literally gay male culture, what they’re doing, the peacocking, trying to show each other up and like only seek validation from other men, which is from a gender perspective, I’m like, what’s going on here? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels like horseshoe theory a little bit. They are doing all of these performative things that come right back to a drag of what a straight man is. It’s like it’s heterosexual drag. Like you’re trying to, you know, build up your face a certain way, you’re trying to mog other straight men, like that’s drag, honey. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like that’s gender performance. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">100% Yeah, I mean, self-improvement leans so well into fascist ideology because a lot of it is predicated on this idea that you can earn your way into something better, which is exactly what looksmaxxing is, right? You can gamify your looks. Like, If you’re not hot now, all you need to do is do all these steps and gain more points, more aura points, until you have achieved this thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is exactly why in Nazi Germany you see a lot of propaganda being espoused about the strongman. That was a huge beauty standard at that point in Hitler’s Germany, was specifically this idea of a man who is super jacked and is super like, is mogged, really, and I have no other word for it really. It’s just like they really..\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A mogged man has always been this cultural fascination and in many ways a mogged woman, obviously. Um, has been a huge part of, uh, fascist ideology for a long time. You know, think about all these essays about why Republican women all look the same and they have this specific look about them. And it has a lot to do with this culture of self-improvement and making all these alterations to yourself to try and earn your way or like bootstrap your way into beauty and therefore access and power and all of these things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Okay, well, looksmaxxing, the big thing of the year right now, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m saving it because I think there’s going to be developments. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">No, yeah, there are going to be new words that have never been said before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s going be crazy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But looks maxed as a trend, I think we’re saving. After the break, a new bombshell enters the villa. Unfortunately, she’s AI generated and also made of fruit. Steffi and I are going to explain all of the drama around AI Fruit Love Island. Stick around. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have a story for you now. Are you familiar with AI Fruit Love Island? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, am I! Oh my god, I feel like it came out of nowhere and then it’s sudden, it’s like omnipresent now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, for the uninitiated, AI Fruit Love Island was this interactive AI-slop parody of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Love Island\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with sexy anthropomorphized fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from AI Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Welcome Back to Fruit Love Island. Today we’ve got a steamy challenge and after over 370,000 viewer votes, our bombshells have officially hit the villa. All right ladies let’s get this started. You’ll be kissed one by each guy and after each kiss you rate it. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so that is one of the episodes of Fruit Love Island. What was happening in that clip? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, it’s basically just a real \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Love Island\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> challenge, but done with fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, they have human bodies, um, but their heads are fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are all like, obviously done by AI. The colors are highly saturated. It’s super bright, super like in your face. And then a grape man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and, uh, board shorts, like comes up and kisses the fruit ladies blindfolded. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from AI Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Grapenzo, you’re up first. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Contestant: That was hot, an 8.5. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You see all these badly done reactions in the background of these AI fruit women laughing and sort of being like, ha ha ha, this is crazy. So it just is like a \u003cem>Love Island\u003c/em> episode, but with fruit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for context, this TikTok account kind of came out of nowhere, AICinema021, and they gained about 3.1 million followers in like a week and a half. And now there are so many copycat accounts. The characters include Limeyra, the lime, Bananito, the banana who has abs and is always shirtless, Strawberrina, the strawberry, Coconick, the sexy coconut. And yeah, it’s not good. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The animation and voices are all stilted. There’s zero consistency. It’s pure slop. So viewers gave storyline feedback via Google Form and voted for their faves in the comments. And this account was getting crazy numbers, like 20 million views per episode at its peak and just churning out new episodes every day. I feel like it used to be kind of embarrassing to enjoy this kind of content, but then you had Zara Larsson and Joe Jonas being like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait for the next episode.’ Like major celebrities. But yeah, what’s your like initial gut reaction here? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it makes sense why this thing is taken off, because even though young people online want to act like only boomers love watching AI slop, the fact is our brains are primed to watch AI slop. We have all these deep fried memes and internet humor is so self-referential, but it removes a lot of these barriers in our heads of consuming something like this that really feels as though, like, okay, maybe, um, what could be embarrassing previously could be ironically fun now. I love it because it’s fascinating to see how excited people get about it. But like, is the content good? No, it’s trash, but I don’t think it’s trying to be good. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Well, have you been following the great AI Fruit Love Island crash out… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have not. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…that happened over the weekend? Okay. So this account literally gained millions and millions of followers, three million followers in like a week and a half, which is insane. Like there are human creators who grind for years to get a third of that. But, you know, this account was able to just churn out content so fast and people were invested. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So basically, people were criticizing the account for being AI slop and criticizing viewers for being slop consumers. And the creator did not respond well. In TikTok comments, they complained about how hard it was to make this content and basically implied that like viewers were ungrateful. A real hilarious irony where they were like, it’s really hard because I have to prompt so many times and the AI sometimes messes up and I have to redo it and then I have edit it together. And it sometimes takes me like three hours to make one of these videos. And it’s like, yeah, well… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagine how long it must take to film a real TV episode? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s so funny that they’re like, this is so hard, even like having to prompt a generator to be like, and now make Strawberrina kiss the kiwi man is like too much effort. So then their video started getting removed. The creator claimed that it was part of a mass reporting campaign and started crashing onto their story. So this was the first one…they were, I guess, sick of it, right? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were like, “This is it. I’m sick of all of you.” They were getting criticized for like wasting water basically and people were pointing out like, hey, this is like really sh*tty that you’re kind of encouraging this consumption. So they were posting like, “Was a good run, didn’t expect any of this, but here we are from being a nobody to being cancelled. I guess I’ll take it. People hate to see people win,”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s awesome! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…with screenshots from like their episodes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I’m so glad y’all got what you wanted. Saving the planet three gallons of water at a time, truly inspirational. It’s like, f*ck all y’all, you jealous motherf*ckers, save the planet, OMG, water, OMG. I love water, clean water, please clean water. What y’ all sound like.”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s hilarious. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Thanks for 3 million followers though. Wow, I guess some might like it.” Then they posted one final one, basically saying like, this series is over, this is it, with Bananito, a fan favorite, unfortunately, the sexy banana that is never wearing a shirt. Um, and basically they said, “All right, f*ck all you b*tches, no more Fruit Love Island. Since people are so obsessed with it, all my videos banned, I make no money. I guess I am being targeted because no other AI account is getting f*cked. Y’all heard it from Bananito himself. Bye.”. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bye. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s just really funny because they also got mad that other like copycat AI accounts were like copying their theme, which is a real like, so many layers between like, being mad about the copycats and then being like suddenly like creative integrity matters basically. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then being mad at like the effort it took to make these videos. The layers of complete unawareness just go so deep. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter] It’s one of those things where I’m like, oh, of course, this is where we are. People are so fixated on this idea of it’s fine until it’s me because passive consumption is just so self-centric, you’re only thinking about yourself. So of course this person’s mad that other people are stealing their AI fruit slop content without contributing to the AI slop database that can then pull out more content. Okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like a content self-eating snake, you know? But I will say, there is one glimmer of hope, despite how many people were obsessed with this slop. I would say there’s an equal faction of people who are really into human-made content. And so this inspired several Fruit Love Island non-AI copycats,. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With real fruit? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…which I will show you now, which is really beautiful. I love that people are doing this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Audio from Fruit Love Island] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Host: Welcome to episode one of Fruit Love Island, that’s not AI. I’ve made sure to gather the juiciest of drama in the villa in the past day. Now let’s see what’s happened. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Contestant: I’m here to break hearts, not to fall in love. Hopefully these guys don’t get too attached. Or I don’t. I won’t though. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So it’s basically a similar idea, but it’s not really animated so much as like, there are these photoshopped pictures of like people, human bodies with fruits for heads. It’s a human being that made this and it’s not as refined, but they did get voice actors on Discord to like volunteer their voices and voice all of this. And so I’m just like really encouraged by the fact that this has kind of blown up this non-AI Fruit Love Island. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that’s beautiful. I think we need to reject modernity and embrace tradition in a lot of ways, because we already had Annoying Orange. We need to bring back the original recipes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I know. And like Annoying Orange,I hated that content. I didn’t dread it. But you know what? A human being made it.\u003cbr>\n\u003cb>\u003cbr>\nSteffi Cao: \u003c/b>A human-being made it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>So AI Fruit Love Island, do we save or do we scroll?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gonna scroll on it, but I defer to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m going to scroll on it too. I think it had a good run. I don’t think we need more of it. I think the crash out was beautiful and hilarious and a real internet moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Perfect irony. It’s truly, like, perfect. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tell us about this next story you brought. What’s going on with BTS’ new album? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of BTS music] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Swim swim, \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is how it all begins\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Swim, swim\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just wanna dive…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BTS was away in the military for four years, and the K-pop group, who was arguably one of the biggest acts in the industry and has been for many years, returned with an album called Arirang, and it was predominantly sung in English, and because of that, as well as the fact that it was a different sound from what they’ve previously put out in the past, it was, I think, personally sonically more mixed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip of BTS music] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Watch this, watch this, \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Beat going hooligan. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pop out, we actin’ a fool again \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It became very controversial. It didn’t also help that when they did their first live performance in Seoul after the fact, there were a lot of statistics reported about how many people actually attended. They shut down a very busy intersection in Seoul saying that 300,000 people were expected to show up. Korean officials, some of them said that as low as 42,000 showed up and there were adverse impacts from store owners who expected a lot of influx but didn’t get that. And so now there’s this huge debate happening about this album, what it means for K-pop in the industry and like how things have shifted, et cetera. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think the fandom has aged out of, like, acting like fans? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cem>[Laughter] \u003c/em>I think that the industry has shifted a lot, and what a fan should act like has changed with it. Because I think in the past, the eternal struggle of a BTS ARMY was trying to convince people that K-pop was a serious art form, that it wasn’t just some silly thing that teen girls listened to, that it was corporate slop pop music, that there were a lot of uphill battles, I think, for a K-Pop fan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think now, over the past four years, you’ve seen a lot more Western embrace of K-pop as a serious art form, as a legitimate cultural export, and not like a niche subculture. So I think that with “K-Pop Demon Hunters”, you have Blackpink headlining Coachella, you had KATSEYE at Lollapalooza, you had all these bigger acts coming out of a Korean system that I think is legitimized in a different way. And so I think that BTS ARMY doesn’t have to convince anyone anymore that BTS is legit. It has shifted this fan identity of like, okay, well, now what? And now what happens?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, you mentioned that like the entire album is sang in English or like all the lyrics are mostly in English, which is interesting because Arirang is a really culturally important folk song in Korea with a lot of history behind it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Arirang sung in Korean from Youtube user @Miss_Taex] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think people expected a little bit more of that cultural representation with this album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I think BTS has also throughout their career really emphasized their Korean-ness, especially because they tend to sample a lot of traditional Korean music, a lot of Korean culture comes into play into their performances. And so I think that it was disappointing for a lot fans to open up this album and hear Teddy Swims in the song. Right? They end on a country song, which is like, possibly the most American form of music that we associate in mainstream culture. We don’t associate country music with Korea. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, right. And it’s a hard thing to follow “K-Pop Demon Hunters.” Just like the way that that movie was such a cultural moment and how it introduced so many people to Korean folklore and Korean culture and Korean language. That was a movie that was in English, but a lot of the songs were in Korean. And a lot people who have never spoken Korean learned those songs. And so it’s interesting that BTS wouldn’t see that and like kind of seize the moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, 100%. I think that it’s frustrating as a fan to feel like the whole reason that you fell so deeply in love with this group has suddenly shifted under your feet and that the intention of the group’s project didn’t align with where you thought they were going to go. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Okay, well, BTS’s new album, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think. I’m going to personally scroll on it, but I think that there’s a lot to talk about in terms of like Asian artistry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a lot to keep an eye on, but personally, don’t come for me, ARMY. I didn’t like the album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me either. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I’m gonna scroll on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was just bored. I was bored. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m in ARMY. I’m in ARMY-da. And I got the tickets. Any ARMY that wants to come for me and I will see you at MetLife. I’ve got the tickets. And what now? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But you can be disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I’m disappointed in the album. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re allowed to be disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m disappointed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you’re allowed to scroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I am allowed to scroll on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, last story for today. The Meta lawsuits. Okay, so Meta faced two separate lawsuits: one in California over social media addiction and one in New Mexico for child safety. The one in California took place in LA and it centered around this 20 year-old woman who said that she became addicted to YouTube and Instagram as a child. And that that greatly affected her mental health.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Snapchat and TikTok were also both defendants, but they settled before it went to court. And a jury in LA found Google and Meta both negligent because the design of their apps encourages infinite scrolling. And the companies didn’t warn users about the dangers of that. So the plaintiff’s lawyer said that both Meta and Google intentionally target kids and prioritize profit over safety. \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\nThe jury concluded that Meta is liable for $4.2 million in damages, and Google is liable for $1.8 million. And then for the case in New Mexico, the state sued Meta over child safety issues. Former employees testified that underage users were shown sexualized content on Instagram and were exposed to predators. And during the court proceedings, they said that Meta’s decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger blocked access to evidence of predators grooming minors. And basically, this is the first time that New Mexico, as a state, was able to successfully sue Meta. So now Meta was ordered to pay $375 million.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So these lawsuits are being celebrated as huge wins for child safety and kind of taking down these evil tech companies. But I’m kind of skeptical of big companies like Meta and Google actually changing their practices. And whenever I hear like child safety social media lawsuit or like child safety and social media in the same sentence, I’m like, everyone wants kids to be safe. Everyone wants to protect the kids. No one wants to expose kids to predators or inappropriate content. But alarm bells are going off in my head where I’m, like, will they be using this to justify more surveillance and more censorship and more practices like age verification, which we’ve covered a lot on this show. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it makes sense that there’s a lot of cynicism around these child safety lawsuits because what we’ve seen over our careers is that every time there has been one of these landmark lawsuits, it’s like, what is it actually put into practice? People have been concerned about this topic for many, many years, but it feels like the people who are in Congress still miss the mark on the concept of social media as itself. We’ve seen endless clips of Congress people essentially asking Mark Zuckerberg for tech help during Senate hearings. Yeah. So it makes sense that this verdict, even though it’s being lauded as a huge case, I’m not convinced on it either. We’ve seen Meta pay up a lot in the past, and it hasn’t seemed to really shift the needle at all. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s like, if anything, the practices don’t change. Kids aren’t necessarily safer. And everyone else is a little bit more surveilled and censored, like, with the current wave of age verification requirements, like, sweeping any internet platform whatsoever, where you have to put in your ID to continue using Spotify in some countries and I really distrust that. And, I do kind of worry that like any kind of trying to like ensure child safety on social media will just be used to justify more age verification laws. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, 100%. I think that the solution being trusting big tech to manage more of our data and requests that we give up more of privacy is like, it makes a lot of sense as people who’ve grown up online and we’ve seen this play before. It does, I think, breed more of a culture of surveillance.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think also the problem with this lawsuit is that like, it’s not a silver bullet. Like this is a multi-pronged problem where it’s like a part of it is having adults be smarter about their tech use and teaching their kids to critically analyze the content they’re consuming day in and day out. It’s a lot on the education system.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s on providing structural support for young kids to have more time offline to build all these social skills that when you are isolated and just on your feed even though it can be very fun and exciting to be on Tumblr as a 16-year-old, freewheeling it online, you still need an infrastructure behind you to teach you all these skills that you don’t really get when you are online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it’s like a multi-pronged problem. It really is on every adult, regardless of where you stand, if you have kids or not, to try and train yourself to be better about your own skillset, because they’re kids, they’re just imitating whatever resource is there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right, and it’s like, Taylor Lorenz on her Free Speech Friday series pointed out that a lot of kids do still, you still need to let them have agency online in some capacity and just like, you know, a lot kids do rely on these online resources to access information about sex ed or find queer community when they don’t have that in real life and to potentially silo them further and take that away could actually endanger kids. Okay, the child safety lawsuits with Meta and Google, do we save or do we scroll? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like we’re going to have to save it because this is going to continue. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, It’s an evergreen save. This is just collecting more and more tabs every day. Thank you so much for joining us, Steffi. Where can people follow your work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Steffi Cao: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for having me, Morgan. You can check me out on Instagram at Steffi Cao, S-T-E-F-F-I-C-A-O, and my sub-stack, It’s Steffi. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Perfect, thanks so much. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it’s reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. Our team includes producer, Maya Cueva. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts. Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "what-is-the-point-of-californias-privacy-laws-if-big-tech-ignores-them",
"title": "What Is the Point of California’s Privacy Laws if Big Tech Ignores Them?",
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"headTitle": "What Is the Point of California’s Privacy Laws if Big Tech Ignores Them? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>An independent review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">Microsoft, Meta and Google\u003c/a> web traffic in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> in March found the tech companies may have violated state regulations around internet privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">audit\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://webxray.ai/\">webXray\u003c/a>, also said that nearly 200 online advertising services ignored “legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals” around data sharing, along with more than half of nearly 7,000 websites in California, despite user requests to opt-out of cookie tracking, the most visible opt-out mechanism the laws require.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is despite the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11792899/the-california-consumer-privacy-act-mandates-what-again-exactly\">California Consumer Privacy Act\u003c/a>, as expanded by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11801063/get-ready-for-another-consumer-privacy-initiative-in-california#:~:text=Listen,to%20the%20Attorney%20General's%20Office.\"> California Privacy Rights Act\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844163/proposition-24-californians-say-yes-to-expanding-on-nations-toughest-data-privacy-law\"> other state privacy legislation\u003c/a>, enforced by both the state attorney general’s office and the California Privacy Protection Agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our findings reveal major technology companies simply ignore globally defined opt-out signals, raising the spectre of industrial-scale non-compliance with California requirements,” the \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">report’s\u003c/a> website states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Businesses that sell or share your personal information are legally required to honor the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa/gpc\">Global Privacy Control\u003c/a>, a “stop selling or sharing my data” switch available on web browsers, or as a browser extension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company that conducted the audit, webXray, was founded by Timothy Libert, a privacy expert who led cookie policy and compliance at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> offices in Sunnyvale from 2021 to 2023. Libert spent 15 years in academia studying the topic and worked as a consultant for national and state regulators before his time at Google.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11773481\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11773481\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut.jpg\" alt=\"computer screen stock image\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">With no federal law governing digital privacy, California’s Consumer Privacy Act was the first to offer state residents some control over the use of their data by companies. \u003ccite>(Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>webXray, his current venture, functions as a white-hat hacker outfit for hire, advising Silicon Valley companies on legal compliance and scouring the internet for privacy violations for law firms pursuing class action suits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ask the average Californian if they feel they have more privacy now than before the CCPA was passed. I think the answer’s going to be no. And as somebody who has the ability, knowledge and background to measure it, I’m going to say scientifically, the answer is also no,” Libert told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 86% of the time, Meta 69% and Microsoft 50%.[aside postID=news_12079472 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-1501991882.jpg']“Google’s failure to honor the [Global Privacy Control] opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic,” the report noted, concluding, “This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Consumer privacy is a top priority for us, and we remain committed to transparency and compliance with applicable privacy requirements,” a Microsoft spokesperson said by email. “As outlined in our Privacy Statement, when we receive a GPC signal, we opt the user out of sharing personal data with third parties for personalized advertising, and our advertising systems are designed to reflect that choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certain Microsoft cookies are necessary for operational purposes, and may therefore be placed and read even when a GPC signal is detected.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This report is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our products work. We honor opt-outs provided by advertisers and publishers as required by law,” a Google spokesperson wrote KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an emailed statement, a Meta spokesperson called webXray’s audit “a blatant marketing ploy that misrepresents how the Global Privacy Control setting works,” and the company’s role.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The control setting restricts how data is shared, not collected, and Meta already requires that when using the Meta pixel, advertisers only share with us information they have obtained the right to share,” the statement continued. “Meta further encourages websites to use our Limited Data Use feature so they can clearly indicate to us when they have permission to share certain information – and when we get information identified that way, we restrict its use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Libert disagreed, arguing as he did in his audit that “just adding a couple lines of code” would bring the companies into compliance with California law. “Their claims that I ‘misunderstood’ anything are farcical. I wrote the cookie policy,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12031243\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1568px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12031243\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1568\" height=\"1045\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy.jpg 1568w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1568px) 100vw, 1568px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The seal above the offices of the California Department of Justice in Sacramento on April 19, 2022. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Under the CCPA, each violation carries a $2,500 fine, or $7,500 if intentional. The companies, he said, are wealthy enough to pay fines and shrug them off without changing how they do business. “If you make them change the code, the whole system falls apart, and that’s what they’re terrified of,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for the California Department of Justice declined to comment on the specific issues raised by the report, but wrote in an email, “We always welcome reporting about potential CCPA violations — anyone interested in reporting a potential violation to our office can go to \u003ca href=\"http://oag.ca.gov/report\">oag.ca.gov/report\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The\u003ca href=\"https://cppa.ca.gov\"> California Privacy Protection Agency\u003c/a> declined to comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state attorney general’s office has settled with a wide variety of companies in\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-la-city-attorney-feldstein-soto-announce-500000\"> gaming\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-largest-ccpa-settlement-date-secures-155\"> health\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030969/california-privacy-agency-fines-american-honda-over-consumer-data-violations\"> automotive\u003c/a> industries; conducted sweeps of\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-investigative-sweep-location-data-industry\"> location data\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-investigative-sweep-focuses-streaming-services\"> streaming apps and devices\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/data-privacy-day-attorney-general-bonta-focuses-surveillance-pricing-compliance\"> surveillance pricing\u003c/a>; and formed information-sharing\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/state-privacy-regulators-assemble-attorney-general-bonta-announces-bipartisan\"> partnerships\u003c/a> with other state regulators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The largest privacy settlement specifically under the CCPA reached by Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office was a $2.75 million settlement with\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/california-wont-let-it-go-attorney-general-bonta-announces-275-million\"> the Walt Disney Company\u003c/a>, announced Feb.11, 2026.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12036125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12036125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>According to \u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-\">404 Media,\u003c/a> Microsoft, Meta, and Google have collectively\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions-facebook\"> paid billions\u003c/a> in\u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/google-must-pay-425-million-class-action-over-privacy-jury-rules-2025-09-03/?ref=404media.co\"> fees for\u003c/a> previous\u003ca href=\"https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1394?ref=404media.co\"> privacy violations\u003c/a> similar to the ones found during the audit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t really see that shifting the needle,” Libert said, adding the agencies’ actions provide only a “veneer of enforcement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State legislators, meanwhile, said they are working to address the apparent lack of accountability by big tech companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Companies that refuse to comply with the law should face real consequences,” state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becker is the author of multiple bills giving Californians more power over their data, including the still-pending Expanding Privacy Rights Act, \u003ca href=\"https://privacy.ca.gov/2026/01/calprivacy-sponsors-bill-that-expands-deletion-rights-and-accessibility-requirements/'\">SB 923\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those laws, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11947039/delete-act-seeks-to-give-californians-more-power-to-block-data-tracking\">the Delete Act\u003c/a>, allowed residents to \u003ca href=\"https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/about-drop-and-the-delete-act/\">request\u003c/a> that all registered companies that buy and sell your data delete your personal information. Data brokers must begin honoring these requests by Aug. 1, 2026.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064635\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064635\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Attendees of the Microsoft Ignite conference walk through downtown San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think we’re nibbling around the edges” of the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028137/california-lawmakers-take-on-predatory-surveillance-pricing\"> ad-surveillance economy\u003c/a> Becker told KQED. “The Delete Act fundamentally gets to the heart of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, he added, he acknowledged the challenges of fighting for this cause at the state level, versus the federal or even international.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ultimately, all this is about reclaiming control over our data. When someone searches for medical care, manages their finances, looks for a job — that information is deeply personal, it should not be tracked, sold or weaponized without their consent,” Becker said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta and Google web traffic in California found the companies appear to be violating state regulations, potentially exposing themselves to significant fines.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>An independent review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">Microsoft, Meta and Google\u003c/a> web traffic in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> in March found the tech companies may have violated state regulations around internet privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">audit\u003c/a>, by \u003ca href=\"https://webxray.ai/\">webXray\u003c/a>, also said that nearly 200 online advertising services ignored “legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals” around data sharing, along with more than half of nearly 7,000 websites in California, despite user requests to opt-out of cookie tracking, the most visible opt-out mechanism the laws require.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is despite the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11792899/the-california-consumer-privacy-act-mandates-what-again-exactly\">California Consumer Privacy Act\u003c/a>, as expanded by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11801063/get-ready-for-another-consumer-privacy-initiative-in-california#:~:text=Listen,to%20the%20Attorney%20General's%20Office.\"> California Privacy Rights Act\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844163/proposition-24-californians-say-yes-to-expanding-on-nations-toughest-data-privacy-law\"> other state privacy legislation\u003c/a>, enforced by both the state attorney general’s office and the California Privacy Protection Agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our findings reveal major technology companies simply ignore globally defined opt-out signals, raising the spectre of industrial-scale non-compliance with California requirements,” the \u003ca href=\"https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california\">report’s\u003c/a> website states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Businesses that sell or share your personal information are legally required to honor the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa/gpc\">Global Privacy Control\u003c/a>, a “stop selling or sharing my data” switch available on web browsers, or as a browser extension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company that conducted the audit, webXray, was founded by Timothy Libert, a privacy expert who led cookie policy and compliance at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> offices in Sunnyvale from 2021 to 2023. Libert spent 15 years in academia studying the topic and worked as a consultant for national and state regulators before his time at Google.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11773481\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11773481\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut.jpg\" alt=\"computer screen stock image\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/RS38974_GettyImages1091956764-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">With no federal law governing digital privacy, California’s Consumer Privacy Act was the first to offer state residents some control over the use of their data by companies. \u003ccite>(Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>webXray, his current venture, functions as a white-hat hacker outfit for hire, advising Silicon Valley companies on legal compliance and scouring the internet for privacy violations for law firms pursuing class action suits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ask the average Californian if they feel they have more privacy now than before the CCPA was passed. I think the answer’s going to be no. And as somebody who has the ability, knowledge and background to measure it, I’m going to say scientifically, the answer is also no,” Libert told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 86% of the time, Meta 69% and Microsoft 50%.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Google’s failure to honor the [Global Privacy Control] opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic,” the report noted, concluding, “This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Consumer privacy is a top priority for us, and we remain committed to transparency and compliance with applicable privacy requirements,” a Microsoft spokesperson said by email. “As outlined in our Privacy Statement, when we receive a GPC signal, we opt the user out of sharing personal data with third parties for personalized advertising, and our advertising systems are designed to reflect that choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certain Microsoft cookies are necessary for operational purposes, and may therefore be placed and read even when a GPC signal is detected.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This report is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our products work. We honor opt-outs provided by advertisers and publishers as required by law,” a Google spokesperson wrote KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an emailed statement, a Meta spokesperson called webXray’s audit “a blatant marketing ploy that misrepresents how the Global Privacy Control setting works,” and the company’s role.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The control setting restricts how data is shared, not collected, and Meta already requires that when using the Meta pixel, advertisers only share with us information they have obtained the right to share,” the statement continued. “Meta further encourages websites to use our Limited Data Use feature so they can clearly indicate to us when they have permission to share certain information – and when we get information identified that way, we restrict its use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Libert disagreed, arguing as he did in his audit that “just adding a couple lines of code” would bring the companies into compliance with California law. “Their claims that I ‘misunderstood’ anything are farcical. I wrote the cookie policy,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12031243\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1568px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12031243\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1568\" height=\"1045\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy.jpg 1568w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/041922-ATTORNEY-GENERAL-OFFICE-MHN-03-CM-copy-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1568px) 100vw, 1568px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The seal above the offices of the California Department of Justice in Sacramento on April 19, 2022. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Under the CCPA, each violation carries a $2,500 fine, or $7,500 if intentional. The companies, he said, are wealthy enough to pay fines and shrug them off without changing how they do business. “If you make them change the code, the whole system falls apart, and that’s what they’re terrified of,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for the California Department of Justice declined to comment on the specific issues raised by the report, but wrote in an email, “We always welcome reporting about potential CCPA violations — anyone interested in reporting a potential violation to our office can go to \u003ca href=\"http://oag.ca.gov/report\">oag.ca.gov/report\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The\u003ca href=\"https://cppa.ca.gov\"> California Privacy Protection Agency\u003c/a> declined to comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state attorney general’s office has settled with a wide variety of companies in\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-la-city-attorney-feldstein-soto-announce-500000\"> gaming\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-largest-ccpa-settlement-date-secures-155\"> health\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030969/california-privacy-agency-fines-american-honda-over-consumer-data-violations\"> automotive\u003c/a> industries; conducted sweeps of\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-investigative-sweep-location-data-industry\"> location data\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-investigative-sweep-focuses-streaming-services\"> streaming apps and devices\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/data-privacy-day-attorney-general-bonta-focuses-surveillance-pricing-compliance\"> surveillance pricing\u003c/a>; and formed information-sharing\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/state-privacy-regulators-assemble-attorney-general-bonta-announces-bipartisan\"> partnerships\u003c/a> with other state regulators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The largest privacy settlement specifically under the CCPA reached by Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office was a $2.75 million settlement with\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/california-wont-let-it-go-attorney-general-bonta-announces-275-million\"> the Walt Disney Company\u003c/a>, announced Feb.11, 2026.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12036125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12036125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>According to \u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3E%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-independent-audit/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter%3E%3Chttps://www.404media.co/google-microsoft-meta-all-tracking-you-even-when-you-opt-out-according-to-an-\">404 Media,\u003c/a> Microsoft, Meta, and Google have collectively\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions-facebook\"> paid billions\u003c/a> in\u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/google-must-pay-425-million-class-action-over-privacy-jury-rules-2025-09-03/?ref=404media.co\"> fees for\u003c/a> previous\u003ca href=\"https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1394?ref=404media.co\"> privacy violations\u003c/a> similar to the ones found during the audit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t really see that shifting the needle,” Libert said, adding the agencies’ actions provide only a “veneer of enforcement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State legislators, meanwhile, said they are working to address the apparent lack of accountability by big tech companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Companies that refuse to comply with the law should face real consequences,” state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becker is the author of multiple bills giving Californians more power over their data, including the still-pending Expanding Privacy Rights Act, \u003ca href=\"https://privacy.ca.gov/2026/01/calprivacy-sponsors-bill-that-expands-deletion-rights-and-accessibility-requirements/'\">SB 923\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those laws, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11947039/delete-act-seeks-to-give-californians-more-power-to-block-data-tracking\">the Delete Act\u003c/a>, allowed residents to \u003ca href=\"https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/about-drop-and-the-delete-act/\">request\u003c/a> that all registered companies that buy and sell your data delete your personal information. Data brokers must begin honoring these requests by Aug. 1, 2026.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12064635\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12064635\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251119-MICROSOFT-GAZA-PROTEST-MD-01-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Attendees of the Microsoft Ignite conference walk through downtown San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2025. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think we’re nibbling around the edges” of the\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028137/california-lawmakers-take-on-predatory-surveillance-pricing\"> ad-surveillance economy\u003c/a> Becker told KQED. “The Delete Act fundamentally gets to the heart of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, he added, he acknowledged the challenges of fighting for this cause at the state level, versus the federal or even international.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ultimately, all this is about reclaiming control over our data. When someone searches for medical care, manages their finances, looks for a job — that information is deeply personal, it should not be tracked, sold or weaponized without their consent,” Becker said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "foster-city-cyber-attack-rare-ruling-in-social-media-youth-mental-health-trial-and-can-sfs-small-clubs-survive",
"title": "Foster City Cyberattack, Jury Finds Meta and Google Negligent, and Can SF’s Small Clubs Survive?",
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"headTitle": "Foster City Cyberattack, Jury Finds Meta and Google Negligent, and Can SF’s Small Clubs Survive? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"e-91036-text encore-text-body-medium\" data-encore-id=\"text\" data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">In this edition of The Bay’s monthly news roundup, Ericka and Alan are joined by KQED senior editor Alexander Gonzalez to discuss a ransomware attack that hindered services in Foster City, a rare verdict in a case about Meta and Google’s role in fueling a youth mental health crisis, and whether San Francisco’s small clubs can survive. \u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"e-91036-text encore-text-body-medium\" data-encore-id=\"text\" data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">\u003cstrong>Links:\u003c/strong>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"sc-EgOXT hqRROA\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-fragment=\"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\">\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-email-cyberattack-22094070.php\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Bay Area city declares state of emergency 6 days after cyberattack\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (SFGate)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/foster-city-city-s-phone-email-services-22155892.php\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">\u003cu>Foster City: City’s Phone, Email Services Restored After Cybersecurity Breach Last Week\u003c/u>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (SFGate)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (NPR)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13987283\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Can San Francisco’s Small Clubs Survive?\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (KQED)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5160486704&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"\" title=\"\">\u003ci>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:03] I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara, and welcome to the Bay’s March News Roundup, where we sit down and talk about some of the other Bay Area stories that we have been following this month. I’m joined by Senior Editor, Alan Montecillo. What’s up, Alan?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:00:17] Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:18] And our very special guest this month is KQED senior editor Alexander Gonzalez. What a delight to have you here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:25] Hey there, I’m so honored. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:28] Yeah, thank you for joining us. Very briefly, Alex, because I feel like maybe folks aren’t familiar with your voice. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at KQED?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:39] Yeah, I’m a features editor. So I’m working a lot behind the scenes on a good part of what you hear in the morning. So some of those longer interviews and stories that take up more time on the radio. That’s what I do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:53] You’re the producer behind Brian Watt, in other words.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:57] Oh yeah, Brian Watt is my close friend, collaborator, confidant, working closely with him, so he’s the talent. I’m just trying to be there to support him, what he needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:01:08] So if you’re listening to 88.5, the number one news talk radio station, maybe your voice isn’t on the airwaves, but you’re there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:01:17] I’m in the room. In the mornings, yeah. I’m there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:01:19] Well, before we dive into the stories we’ve been following, it’s been a really, really hot month in the Bay Area. Spring is here. It feels like summer is here too. How have you all been dealing with the heat wave and also allergies?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:01:37] Oh my God. I feel like I’m so annoying in our morning meetings when it’s like, Oh, how are we all doing? And I’m like, Oh, my allergies are still bad, but they have been really bad. I feel two different ways about the heat. On the one hand, I feel grateful. The same day it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the Outer Sunset, our niece in Illinois had a snow day. So yeah, not a lot to complain about, but also as a lifelong Zyrtec taker, no free ads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:05] Zyrtec life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:02:05] Yeah. This is It’s been one of the worst allergy seasons I can remember in a very, very long time. I’m just sneezing and blowing my nose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:12] Yeah. And I don’t think you’re the only one either. I went to the doctor maybe like a few weeks ago and my doctor looked at my nose and was like, you’re like the only person who’s walked in here who has not had bad allergies this year. It’s really, really bad this year, have you been struggling at all Alex? You look, you look great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:30] I have no allergy issues whatsoever, the kinds that you’re describing, but you know, my partner does, and so we have the Allegra and Claritin all at home and stocked up. And as for me, the heat is like the best thing in the planet, like I grew up in Florida, So for me anytime it goes over 70 degrees, I’m like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:52] Feels like home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:53] Yes it does, take off that jacket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:56] Well, let’s go ahead and dive into some of the stories we’ve been following this month. I’m gonna go ahead and start with mine. So the city of Foster City in the peninsula voted last week to declare a state of emergency after it was hit by a ransomware attack. This attack took down the city’s network and staff couldn’t make or receive phone calls or respond to emails for a whole week. Basically paralyzing the city’s ability to conduct business and provide services. Phones and emails were finally restored on Friday, but the city was still working to get other functions back online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:03:38] So when we say ransomware attack and Foster City’s networks being down, what does that mean exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:03:45] So employees woke up in the early mornings of March 19th to find that there was a cybersecurity breach on their systems. And basically everything outside of their emergency response system was completely inoperable. There’s now an investigation into just how bad this breach is, but they really have very limited information. They did say that it’s possible that some public information may have been breached as part of this ransomware attack. And they did say that anyone who’s actually done business with the city of Foster City should change their personal passwords and take any measures to protect their personal data just out of abundance of caution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:04:33] So like, if I understand this correctly, everything just went to like a grinding halt. Like, I mean…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:38] I mean, the city said that if you contacted them while their phones and emails were down, that they basically wouldn’t be able to respond until they were back online. City Hall has remained open this whole time, but basically with limited services available. For example, the system that’s used to track like permitting in the city is totally frozen. I also saw on their Facebook page that things like Summer activity registration for the city’s Parks and Recs Department is delayed because of this system-wide outage, though the city has said that emergency services, 911 calls are completely unaffected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:05:19] You mentioned earlier that the city declared a state of emergency. What does that do exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:05:25] The state of emergency allows Foster City to basically breeze past all the regular city procedures that it takes to buy stuff, especially the necessary equipment and supplies that they need to deal with this attack and to basically solve the issue. And it also opens the door for any sort of financial support from outside agencies as well. KQED actually was a victim of a very similar ransomware attack back in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:05:59] Were you here then?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:00] I was, I was here very, very briefly, I think at the very, very start. So I didn’t really deal with the months and months of absolute chaos in the KQD newsroom. But I mean, folks were like using hotspots on their cell phones. It was a crazy time. They were MacGyvering all these ways to keep. The radio going and I think most folks probably didn’t even notice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:06:26] And I also read that as this foster city ransomware attack happened, there’s like a big cybersecurity conference in San Francisco at Moscone, like literally happening right around the same time. So you have basically a lot of expertise here in the city that maybe could have headed over there too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:52] And that is it for my story. We’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, a rare verdict in a case against social media companies and their impact on mental health, and can San Francisco’s small clubs survive? Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:07:16] And we’re back with The Bay’s monthly news roundup where we talk about some of the other stories we’ve been following this month. By the way, if you wanna help support shows like The Bay and the kind of work that we’re doing, make sure to go to kqed.org slash donate. And Alan Montecillo, our senior editor from The Bay, what story did you bring today?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:07:39] Well, it’s a big accountability story for Silicon Valley. A California jury on Wednesday found Meta and Google liable for the depression and anxiety of a 20-year-old woman who says she used these social media apps, specifically YouTube and Instagram, as a small child. They awarded her $6 million. On top of that, this actually comes on the heels of a different trial in New Mexico where Meta was ordered to pay $375 million for not protecting young users from child predators. So… One of the reasons this is significant is I think this is a rare moment of, you know, potential accountability for these companies. And some are wondering whether this could be sort of a so-called big tobacco moment for big tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:08:22] Yeah, Alan, I mean, what was this trial like? What did the people representing this young woman say?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:08:29] The main plaintiff in this California trial was a woman who went by the name of Kaylee. She’s now, like I said, 20 years old. She says she started using Instagram when she was 11, which by the way is against meta terms of service. You’re supposed to be 13 or older to use Instagram. She says, she suffered depression, anxiety, body image issues, and specifically that there were features with these apps like infinite scroll and video autoplay that played a in causing her to become addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:08:56] To these platforms. Partly what’s interesting about this case, right, is like how they went about this legally, like what arguments they made, because I think you, for a long time, there was some law that prevented going after the product specifically, but here they tried to go about this in a different way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:09:14] Way, right? Yes, you’re right. The strategy is really one of the reasons why some folks are saying this could be a turning point. So you can’t really hold companies legally liable for the content that people post on their platforms. It’s a federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So instead, the plaintiff here and potentially others as well are saying, you all, social media companies are essentially manufacturers of a defective product that is addictive. And harms people, especially young people. And furthermore, that you knew that. They showed internal documents from Meta in which Mark Zuckerberg and other executives talked about how they were trying to attract young people, one document said, quote, if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens. Another memo internally showed that 11 year olds were much more likely to keep coming back to Instagram compared with other apps, even though you’re supposed to be 13. So, I think… It’s more about the public health angle and stating a case that these products themselves are designed to be addictive. That’s why the analogies to big tobacco are being drawn here. This is what one of the lawyers in the California trial, Marc Lanier, said after the verdict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marc Lanier \u003c/strong>[00:10:27] We’ve sent a message with this, that you will be held accountable just because of the features alone that drive addiction. That’s a huge message for these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:10:38] I mean, I can think of so many people in my personal life who say, like, I need to take a break from Instagram. It is not good for my mental health. I mean I’ve taken a break from Instagram myself before. But what is the argument on the other side that the tech companies were making in this trial?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:10:57] Well, Meta and Google plan to appeal this decision in California. They say they’ve put in plenty of protections in their products for young people. Metta, and Google also say that there are all kinds of reasons why young people, including the plaintiff, have mental health challenges and that it’s unfair to basically single out social media companies like them as the main cause of it. And Ashly Davis, a spokesperson for Meta. Essentially said as much after the trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ashly Davis \u003c/strong>[00:11:29] Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:11:44] There’s also a Google spokesperson, Jose Castañeda, who said, quote, this case misunderstands YouTube. Remember, this is YouTube and Instagram, who are kind of on the hook here, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. So look, I mean, these companies have a lot of money. They have a lotta lawyers. This is an ultimate defeat for them by any means, but it is significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:12:04] So Alan, one of the interesting details about this trial was this jar of M&M’s. Can you talk more about that? Cause it’s kind of, it’s fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:13] Yeah, Marc Lanier, the lawyer I mentioned earlier, showed the jury a jar full of M&M’s and said that each piece of candy represented a billion dollars that Metta was worth, which kind of brings us to the six million dollar figure that the companies now owe. You could take it a couple different ways. One is like, look, Mark Zuckerberg made more than six million dollars by like the end of this sentence, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:12:37] Drop in the bucket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:38] Drop in the bucket. An M&M. Right. An M& M in the Bucket. Yeah. It’s not a lot of money, but when you think about all the people who use social media and the fact that this is $6 million in damages for one plaintiff, you add that up, it could be a slightly larger drop in the buckets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:12:54] I think this could be a bellwether case, right? This could set some precedent, right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:58] Well, I think it literally is a Bellwether case. It’s tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits that are brought by parents and school districts. And in fact, this summer there will be a federal trial in the Northern District of California with a series of claims made by parents and school district. So lots of people were watching this. I mean, there were parents outside the courthouse whose kids had taken their own lives and they, you know, in part blame social media. Many people had to testify in this trial, including Mark Zuckerberg himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:13:27] No, there have been reports of young people themselves saying they’re like trying to go phone-less, right, and like getting rid of it. There’s that song by Lorde where she throws the cell phone in the water. And I feel like there’s this sense of in the air that young people themselves recognize that tech companies are maybe doing things that, you know, not responsibly done, or you’re not totally aware of, like, your relationship to this tech could be something that I need to change myself. There’s more ownership of our relationship to technology than maybe when we were kind of first starting to use Facebook, where we were just like, wow, this is so cool, a website where we can connect with people. And it feels like we’re light years ahead of where… That place is right now for all kinds of reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:10] I mean, you even see there’s some phone-free school districts, you know, and the results from that can be hit or miss, but what are the other vectors of this feeling that maybe this isn’t great for us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:23] Such an interesting story, Alan, thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:26] You’re very welcome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:29] And last but not least, Alex Gonzalez, editor at KQED, very curious what story you’ve brought for us today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:14:37] Yeah, so this comes from our colleague, Nastia Voynovskaya, and her question for this story is, can San Francisco small clubs survive?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:48] Yeah, I mean, how are San Francisco Small Gloves doing? I feel like I thought about this a lot in the immediate post-pandemic economic recovery phase, I guess, when places were fully opened and we were wondering, oh, are we all going to things?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:15:04] Yeah, you’re totally right. So I think that’s kind of part of what’s happening here. So this was kind of came about from an industry summit during San Francisco’s music week. So it’s kind an insidery thing, but one of the main points that Nastia brings up in this story is, you know, kind of the concern for the health of the local music ecosystem. And specifically these places categorized as like independent music venues. So these are your lay. You know, in San Francisco, Thee Parkside, Bottom of the Hill. But these also happen to be two venues that are gonna be closing this year. And it’s part of this larger trend that was reported on by this trade association recently that said just around a third of these kind of independent music venues are actually profitable. Even though that same report said that they generated billions of dollars for the nation’s economy, then this tension is really What I found interesting and what, Alan, you just brought up about kind of where we are. Six years now this month from the COVID-19 lockdowns, right? Can you believe it? Six years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:11] I was just going to say this actually reminds me of a story that we worked on on the Bay about small local theaters around the Bay Area very similarly struggling with getting people to come back to their theaters post pandemic and closing as a result because of that sort of behavior shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:16:31] That behavior change has been difficult for a lot of folks to sort of get away from, right? We’re just, the competition is the couch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:16:38] Powerful competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:16:39] It’s powerful competition, right? Because you think, what’s going to motivate me to drive to a place, to pay for an expensive ticket, to then you maybe want to partake in a drink. Those drinks are expensive, right. So then that’s kind of what makes this really interesting is that you have all of these structural things, but at the same time, this component of human behavior all coming together when you think about a small independent music venue. It’s like really interesting how we. How there’s an ecosystem around it. If we have fewer of these places that are allowing up and coming acts to give them a chance to do, to showcase their art and also to make money off of what they’re doing, right? To sort of see a career around this, we’re losing that like platform for interesting talent, for new talent to sort of then maybe make it big, right, or find an audience even, right. And let’s not even talk about becoming the next, you know, pop star here. It’s just like. Making it as an artist too, that’s also kind of at play here, just in the way that actors and producers and playwrights want to make it work in a local theater, because if not, then we’re just going to have Marvel the musical. Right. That probably exists. There is a Spider-Man the musical actually. Yeah, that exists. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:17:54] That’s crazy, I did not know that. Yeah, very similarly to this local theater story. It’s like you’re losing this whole part of the pipeline for local artists to make it big.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:18:08] So what’s the move here? I mean, there’s these sort of structural, very high semi-fixed costs that all of these businesses are facing, and then there’s also the consumer behavior side of it. What do we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:18:19] So this is kind of the interesting thing that our colleague Nastia brings up in this story and that she reported on in that some of the panelists at this industry summit were suggesting like kind of recreating a version of the recovery fund that we saw during the COVID lockdowns for artists. So one of the panelist like pitched the idea of like putting a dollar for every ticket sold at a corporate backed concert into like this recovery fund. And then dividing that up among smaller venues, which is kind of interesting, right, that a dollar even can potentially go a really long way. There are things too that artists themselves can do. They can maybe try to push back, you know, push back their agents telling, you know who maybe wanna push them to more profitable venues or places where they’re gonna sell out more tickets and actually say, hey, we actually wanna perform at a bottom of the hill kind of a place, right? And then finally, we the fans, right. We just have to leave the couch, which is… Very challenging i know, but if you do go out there and support these places then that can that can also be an avenue too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:19:23] I mean, it is kind of a relief to know that I have some agency in helping to solve this problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:19:31] Yeah, I mean, you know, the Bay Area has long always been hard for artists, right? But it is such an artistic place historically. And it was a place that called creatives, you know, when we think about the summer of love in the 60s, right. I mean that what a creative what an explosion of creativity at that time. And that legacy so much a part of like what has drawn people to this place. And so then you think about like right now seeing the factors that can prevent that kind of. Wonderful growth of creativity kind of makes you think where is this place going, right? And that’s and the arts are so much a part of like the economy of a place and and what makes a place thrive.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-email-cyberattack-22094070.php\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Bay Area city declares state of emergency 6 days after cyberattack\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (SFGate)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/foster-city-city-s-phone-email-services-22155892.php\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">\u003cu>Foster City: City’s Phone, Email Services Restored After Cybersecurity Breach Last Week\u003c/u>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (SFGate)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (NPR)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli data-slate-node=\"element\">\u003ca class=\"e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ecPEgm gQmQyy\" href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13987283\" data-encore-id=\"textLink\" data-slate-node=\"element\" data-slate-inline=\"true\">\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\">Can San Francisco’s Small Clubs Survive?\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan data-slate-node=\"text\">\u003cspan class=\"sc-eZYNyq jkbEfl\" data-slate-leaf=\"true\"> (KQED)\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5160486704&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"\" title=\"\">\u003ci>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:03] I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara, and welcome to the Bay’s March News Roundup, where we sit down and talk about some of the other Bay Area stories that we have been following this month. I’m joined by Senior Editor, Alan Montecillo. What’s up, Alan?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:00:17] Hey, good morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:18] And our very special guest this month is KQED senior editor Alexander Gonzalez. What a delight to have you here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:25] Hey there, I’m so honored. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:28] Yeah, thank you for joining us. Very briefly, Alex, because I feel like maybe folks aren’t familiar with your voice. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at KQED?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:39] Yeah, I’m a features editor. So I’m working a lot behind the scenes on a good part of what you hear in the morning. So some of those longer interviews and stories that take up more time on the radio. That’s what I do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:00:53] You’re the producer behind Brian Watt, in other words.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:00:57] Oh yeah, Brian Watt is my close friend, collaborator, confidant, working closely with him, so he’s the talent. I’m just trying to be there to support him, what he needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:01:08] So if you’re listening to 88.5, the number one news talk radio station, maybe your voice isn’t on the airwaves, but you’re there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:01:17] I’m in the room. In the mornings, yeah. I’m there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:01:19] Well, before we dive into the stories we’ve been following, it’s been a really, really hot month in the Bay Area. Spring is here. It feels like summer is here too. How have you all been dealing with the heat wave and also allergies?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:01:37] Oh my God. I feel like I’m so annoying in our morning meetings when it’s like, Oh, how are we all doing? And I’m like, Oh, my allergies are still bad, but they have been really bad. I feel two different ways about the heat. On the one hand, I feel grateful. The same day it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the Outer Sunset, our niece in Illinois had a snow day. So yeah, not a lot to complain about, but also as a lifelong Zyrtec taker, no free ads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:05] Zyrtec life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:02:05] Yeah. This is It’s been one of the worst allergy seasons I can remember in a very, very long time. I’m just sneezing and blowing my nose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:12] Yeah. And I don’t think you’re the only one either. I went to the doctor maybe like a few weeks ago and my doctor looked at my nose and was like, you’re like the only person who’s walked in here who has not had bad allergies this year. It’s really, really bad this year, have you been struggling at all Alex? You look, you look great.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:30] I have no allergy issues whatsoever, the kinds that you’re describing, but you know, my partner does, and so we have the Allegra and Claritin all at home and stocked up. And as for me, the heat is like the best thing in the planet, like I grew up in Florida, So for me anytime it goes over 70 degrees, I’m like, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:52] Feels like home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:02:53] Yes it does, take off that jacket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:02:56] Well, let’s go ahead and dive into some of the stories we’ve been following this month. I’m gonna go ahead and start with mine. So the city of Foster City in the peninsula voted last week to declare a state of emergency after it was hit by a ransomware attack. This attack took down the city’s network and staff couldn’t make or receive phone calls or respond to emails for a whole week. Basically paralyzing the city’s ability to conduct business and provide services. Phones and emails were finally restored on Friday, but the city was still working to get other functions back online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:03:38] So when we say ransomware attack and Foster City’s networks being down, what does that mean exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:03:45] So employees woke up in the early mornings of March 19th to find that there was a cybersecurity breach on their systems. And basically everything outside of their emergency response system was completely inoperable. There’s now an investigation into just how bad this breach is, but they really have very limited information. They did say that it’s possible that some public information may have been breached as part of this ransomware attack. And they did say that anyone who’s actually done business with the city of Foster City should change their personal passwords and take any measures to protect their personal data just out of abundance of caution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:04:33] So like, if I understand this correctly, everything just went to like a grinding halt. Like, I mean…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:38] I mean, the city said that if you contacted them while their phones and emails were down, that they basically wouldn’t be able to respond until they were back online. City Hall has remained open this whole time, but basically with limited services available. For example, the system that’s used to track like permitting in the city is totally frozen. I also saw on their Facebook page that things like Summer activity registration for the city’s Parks and Recs Department is delayed because of this system-wide outage, though the city has said that emergency services, 911 calls are completely unaffected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:05:19] You mentioned earlier that the city declared a state of emergency. What does that do exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:05:25] The state of emergency allows Foster City to basically breeze past all the regular city procedures that it takes to buy stuff, especially the necessary equipment and supplies that they need to deal with this attack and to basically solve the issue. And it also opens the door for any sort of financial support from outside agencies as well. KQED actually was a victim of a very similar ransomware attack back in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:05:59] Were you here then?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:00] I was, I was here very, very briefly, I think at the very, very start. So I didn’t really deal with the months and months of absolute chaos in the KQD newsroom. But I mean, folks were like using hotspots on their cell phones. It was a crazy time. They were MacGyvering all these ways to keep. The radio going and I think most folks probably didn’t even notice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:06:26] And I also read that as this foster city ransomware attack happened, there’s like a big cybersecurity conference in San Francisco at Moscone, like literally happening right around the same time. So you have basically a lot of expertise here in the city that maybe could have headed over there too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:52] And that is it for my story. We’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, a rare verdict in a case against social media companies and their impact on mental health, and can San Francisco’s small clubs survive? Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:07:16] And we’re back with The Bay’s monthly news roundup where we talk about some of the other stories we’ve been following this month. By the way, if you wanna help support shows like The Bay and the kind of work that we’re doing, make sure to go to kqed.org slash donate. And Alan Montecillo, our senior editor from The Bay, what story did you bring today?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:07:39] Well, it’s a big accountability story for Silicon Valley. A California jury on Wednesday found Meta and Google liable for the depression and anxiety of a 20-year-old woman who says she used these social media apps, specifically YouTube and Instagram, as a small child. They awarded her $6 million. On top of that, this actually comes on the heels of a different trial in New Mexico where Meta was ordered to pay $375 million for not protecting young users from child predators. So… One of the reasons this is significant is I think this is a rare moment of, you know, potential accountability for these companies. And some are wondering whether this could be sort of a so-called big tobacco moment for big tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:08:22] Yeah, Alan, I mean, what was this trial like? What did the people representing this young woman say?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:08:29] The main plaintiff in this California trial was a woman who went by the name of Kaylee. She’s now, like I said, 20 years old. She says she started using Instagram when she was 11, which by the way is against meta terms of service. You’re supposed to be 13 or older to use Instagram. She says, she suffered depression, anxiety, body image issues, and specifically that there were features with these apps like infinite scroll and video autoplay that played a in causing her to become addicted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:08:56] To these platforms. Partly what’s interesting about this case, right, is like how they went about this legally, like what arguments they made, because I think you, for a long time, there was some law that prevented going after the product specifically, but here they tried to go about this in a different way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:09:14] Way, right? Yes, you’re right. The strategy is really one of the reasons why some folks are saying this could be a turning point. So you can’t really hold companies legally liable for the content that people post on their platforms. It’s a federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So instead, the plaintiff here and potentially others as well are saying, you all, social media companies are essentially manufacturers of a defective product that is addictive. And harms people, especially young people. And furthermore, that you knew that. They showed internal documents from Meta in which Mark Zuckerberg and other executives talked about how they were trying to attract young people, one document said, quote, if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens. Another memo internally showed that 11 year olds were much more likely to keep coming back to Instagram compared with other apps, even though you’re supposed to be 13. So, I think… It’s more about the public health angle and stating a case that these products themselves are designed to be addictive. That’s why the analogies to big tobacco are being drawn here. This is what one of the lawyers in the California trial, Marc Lanier, said after the verdict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marc Lanier \u003c/strong>[00:10:27] We’ve sent a message with this, that you will be held accountable just because of the features alone that drive addiction. That’s a huge message for these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:10:38] I mean, I can think of so many people in my personal life who say, like, I need to take a break from Instagram. It is not good for my mental health. I mean I’ve taken a break from Instagram myself before. But what is the argument on the other side that the tech companies were making in this trial?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:10:57] Well, Meta and Google plan to appeal this decision in California. They say they’ve put in plenty of protections in their products for young people. Metta, and Google also say that there are all kinds of reasons why young people, including the plaintiff, have mental health challenges and that it’s unfair to basically single out social media companies like them as the main cause of it. And Ashly Davis, a spokesperson for Meta. Essentially said as much after the trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ashly Davis \u003c/strong>[00:11:29] Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:11:44] There’s also a Google spokesperson, Jose Castañeda, who said, quote, this case misunderstands YouTube. Remember, this is YouTube and Instagram, who are kind of on the hook here, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. So look, I mean, these companies have a lot of money. They have a lotta lawyers. This is an ultimate defeat for them by any means, but it is significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:12:04] So Alan, one of the interesting details about this trial was this jar of M&M’s. Can you talk more about that? Cause it’s kind of, it’s fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:13] Yeah, Marc Lanier, the lawyer I mentioned earlier, showed the jury a jar full of M&M’s and said that each piece of candy represented a billion dollars that Metta was worth, which kind of brings us to the six million dollar figure that the companies now owe. You could take it a couple different ways. One is like, look, Mark Zuckerberg made more than six million dollars by like the end of this sentence, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:12:37] Drop in the bucket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:38] Drop in the bucket. An M&M. Right. An M& M in the Bucket. Yeah. It’s not a lot of money, but when you think about all the people who use social media and the fact that this is $6 million in damages for one plaintiff, you add that up, it could be a slightly larger drop in the buckets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:12:54] I think this could be a bellwether case, right? This could set some precedent, right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:12:58] Well, I think it literally is a Bellwether case. It’s tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits that are brought by parents and school districts. And in fact, this summer there will be a federal trial in the Northern District of California with a series of claims made by parents and school district. So lots of people were watching this. I mean, there were parents outside the courthouse whose kids had taken their own lives and they, you know, in part blame social media. Many people had to testify in this trial, including Mark Zuckerberg himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:13:27] No, there have been reports of young people themselves saying they’re like trying to go phone-less, right, and like getting rid of it. There’s that song by Lorde where she throws the cell phone in the water. And I feel like there’s this sense of in the air that young people themselves recognize that tech companies are maybe doing things that, you know, not responsibly done, or you’re not totally aware of, like, your relationship to this tech could be something that I need to change myself. There’s more ownership of our relationship to technology than maybe when we were kind of first starting to use Facebook, where we were just like, wow, this is so cool, a website where we can connect with people. And it feels like we’re light years ahead of where… That place is right now for all kinds of reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:10] I mean, you even see there’s some phone-free school districts, you know, and the results from that can be hit or miss, but what are the other vectors of this feeling that maybe this isn’t great for us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:23] Such an interesting story, Alan, thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:26] You’re very welcome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:29] And last but not least, Alex Gonzalez, editor at KQED, very curious what story you’ve brought for us today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:14:37] Yeah, so this comes from our colleague, Nastia Voynovskaya, and her question for this story is, can San Francisco small clubs survive?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:14:48] Yeah, I mean, how are San Francisco Small Gloves doing? I feel like I thought about this a lot in the immediate post-pandemic economic recovery phase, I guess, when places were fully opened and we were wondering, oh, are we all going to things?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:15:04] Yeah, you’re totally right. So I think that’s kind of part of what’s happening here. So this was kind of came about from an industry summit during San Francisco’s music week. So it’s kind an insidery thing, but one of the main points that Nastia brings up in this story is, you know, kind of the concern for the health of the local music ecosystem. And specifically these places categorized as like independent music venues. So these are your lay. You know, in San Francisco, Thee Parkside, Bottom of the Hill. But these also happen to be two venues that are gonna be closing this year. And it’s part of this larger trend that was reported on by this trade association recently that said just around a third of these kind of independent music venues are actually profitable. Even though that same report said that they generated billions of dollars for the nation’s economy, then this tension is really What I found interesting and what, Alan, you just brought up about kind of where we are. Six years now this month from the COVID-19 lockdowns, right? Can you believe it? Six years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:11] I was just going to say this actually reminds me of a story that we worked on on the Bay about small local theaters around the Bay Area very similarly struggling with getting people to come back to their theaters post pandemic and closing as a result because of that sort of behavior shift.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:16:31] That behavior change has been difficult for a lot of folks to sort of get away from, right? We’re just, the competition is the couch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:16:38] Powerful competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:16:39] It’s powerful competition, right? Because you think, what’s going to motivate me to drive to a place, to pay for an expensive ticket, to then you maybe want to partake in a drink. Those drinks are expensive, right. So then that’s kind of what makes this really interesting is that you have all of these structural things, but at the same time, this component of human behavior all coming together when you think about a small independent music venue. It’s like really interesting how we. How there’s an ecosystem around it. If we have fewer of these places that are allowing up and coming acts to give them a chance to do, to showcase their art and also to make money off of what they’re doing, right? To sort of see a career around this, we’re losing that like platform for interesting talent, for new talent to sort of then maybe make it big, right, or find an audience even, right. And let’s not even talk about becoming the next, you know, pop star here. It’s just like. Making it as an artist too, that’s also kind of at play here, just in the way that actors and producers and playwrights want to make it work in a local theater, because if not, then we’re just going to have Marvel the musical. Right. That probably exists. There is a Spider-Man the musical actually. Yeah, that exists. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:17:54] That’s crazy, I did not know that. Yeah, very similarly to this local theater story. It’s like you’re losing this whole part of the pipeline for local artists to make it big.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alan Montecillo \u003c/strong>[00:18:08] So what’s the move here? I mean, there’s these sort of structural, very high semi-fixed costs that all of these businesses are facing, and then there’s also the consumer behavior side of it. What do we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:18:19] So this is kind of the interesting thing that our colleague Nastia brings up in this story and that she reported on in that some of the panelists at this industry summit were suggesting like kind of recreating a version of the recovery fund that we saw during the COVID lockdowns for artists. So one of the panelist like pitched the idea of like putting a dollar for every ticket sold at a corporate backed concert into like this recovery fund. And then dividing that up among smaller venues, which is kind of interesting, right, that a dollar even can potentially go a really long way. There are things too that artists themselves can do. They can maybe try to push back, you know, push back their agents telling, you know who maybe wanna push them to more profitable venues or places where they’re gonna sell out more tickets and actually say, hey, we actually wanna perform at a bottom of the hill kind of a place, right? And then finally, we the fans, right. We just have to leave the couch, which is… Very challenging i know, but if you do go out there and support these places then that can that can also be an avenue too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:19:23] I mean, it is kind of a relief to know that I have some agency in helping to solve this problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Gonzalez \u003c/strong>[00:19:31] Yeah, I mean, you know, the Bay Area has long always been hard for artists, right? But it is such an artistic place historically. And it was a place that called creatives, you know, when we think about the summer of love in the 60s, right. I mean that what a creative what an explosion of creativity at that time. And that legacy so much a part of like what has drawn people to this place. And so then you think about like right now seeing the factors that can prevent that kind of. Wonderful growth of creativity kind of makes you think where is this place going, right? And that’s and the arts are so much a part of like the economy of a place and and what makes a place thrive.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> jury on Wednesday found that Meta and Google’s YouTube were to blame for the depression and anxiety of a woman who compulsively used social media as a small child, awarding her $6 million in a rare verdict holding Silicon Valley accountable for its role in fueling a youth mental health crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jurors concluded that Meta and Google should pay the woman $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta on the hook for 70% of that amount.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the verdict was read, the plaintiff, known only as Kaley, looked straight ahead stony-faced, while her lawyers shook their heads in approval. The lawyers for Meta and Google did not react to the jury’s decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade that led to industry changes against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joseph VanZandt, the co-lead lawyer for families and others suing social media companies, said Wednesday’s judgement is a step toward holding Silicon Valley giants accountable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But this verdict is bigger than one case. For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features. Today’s verdict is a referendum — from a jury, to an entire industry — that accountability has arrived,” he said in a joint statement with the plaintiff’s legal team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta and Google said they disagree with the verdict. Meta said it is weighing its legal options and Google plans to appeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said Google spokesman José Castañeda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The verdict from a Los Angeles jury over the harms of social media comes a day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/03/24/g-s1-115019/new-mexico-meta-children-mental-health\">pay $375 million in damages\u003c/a> for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook. The New Mexico jury found Meta responsible for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms, declaring that the tech company had flouted state consumer protection laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That trial will also enter a second phase, in May, in which a judge will decide whether Meta created a public nuisance and if the company must pay additional penalties to address harms. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he will also ask the court to force changes to make Meta’s apps safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Juries in New Mexico and California have recognized that Meta’s public deception and design features are putting children in harm’s way,” Torrez said in a statement on Wednesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12077556\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12077556\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-2000x1333.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves Los Angeles Superior Court after testifying in a trial examining whether social media companies designed their platforms to be addictive to children on Feb. 18, 2026. (Photo by Apu GOMES / AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The blockbuster verdicts land against the backdrop of school districts and state lawmakers around the country limiting or banning phone use in schools. This week’s verdicts mark the first time juries have decided that tech companies are at least partially liable for online and off-line dangers kids and teenagers encounter after incessantly using social media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over a more than month-long trial in Los Angeles, the jury of five men and seven women heard competing narratives about what role social media platforms played in the mental health struggles of a woman identified as KGM, or Kaley, a now-20-year-old from Chico, Calif., who said she first started using YouTube at 6 years old and Instagram when she was 11.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawyers for KGM argued that Instagram and YouTube were deliberately designed to be addictive and the companies knew the platforms were harming young people, while the tech companies countered that their services cannot be blamed for complex mental health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KGM’s legal team showed the jury internal documents from Meta in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives described the company’s efforts to attract and keep kids and teens on its platforms. One document said: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” and another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram, compared with competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under questioning about these documents, Zuckerberg told the jury that keeping young users safe has always been a company priority. “If people feel like they’re not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?” Zuckerberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial is a test case, known as a bellwether, tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits brought by parents and school districts arguing that social media giants should be considered manufacturers of defective products for hooking a generation of young people to social media feeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the case, the companies insisted that there is no scientific proof that social media causes mental health issues, suggesting that they are being used as a scapegoat for the multi-faceted emotional issues children face that can have many root causes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snapchat and TikTok were also defendants in the case, but both companies \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5684196/social-media-kids-addiction-mental-health-trial\">settled\u003c/a> before the trial began.\u003cbr>\nL.A. case focused on design of social media platforms to overcome liability shield\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades, tech companies have avoided legal liability over the content that appears on their sites because of a federal law known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/994395889/how-one-mans-fight-against-an-aol-troll-sealed-the-tech-industrys-power\">Section 230\u003c/a> of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says that tech companies are not legally responsible for what their users post. This has made it difficult to bring cases over social media harms to trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the Los Angeles case, lawyers took a different approach by focusing on how tech companies built their platforms. They argued that features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, autoplay and beauty filters made apps like Instagram and YouTube equivalent to a “digital casino,” which young people found too irresistible to put down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By taking this tack, the lawyers pursued a case alleging defective design that was able to get around the high bar set by Section 230. It’s not what users post, the lawyers argued, but the very architecture of social media platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction,” said KGM’s lawyer Mark Lanier, a Texas trial attorney and part-time pastor who had a penchant for drawing on documents with markers on overhead project slides to keep the jury engaged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the course of five weeks, jurors heard from therapists, engineers, tech executives including Zuckerberg, and the plaintiff herself about just how culpable big tech companies should be for contributing to KGM’s mental health struggles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Were her issues pre-existing, or exacerbated by her home life, or deepened by social media?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta and Google fought back by underscoring the emotional and physical abuse her medical records indicated she experienced at home. Lawyers for the tech companies also hammered the point that Kaley’s own therapist never documented that social media use was a factor in her mental health problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the witness stand, KGM testified that using social media affected her self-worth, as she got further drawn into the apps and withdrew from friends and family. She developed depression and body dysmorphia, she said, as she continuously compared herself to others and used beauty filters to enhance her appearance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She so craved the validation of social media, she said, that she would run off to the bathroom at school to check the number of “likes” her posts had received. She testified that it was hard to concentrate on school because all she wanted to do was stay glued to her social media feeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jury was not tasked with deciding whether Meta and Google had created Kaley’s mental health woes, but rather if her compulsive social media use was a “substantial factor” in her struggles and if the defective design of the platforms was the direct cause of the distress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lanier, who is known for trotting out large exhibits for trial spectacle, closed his questioning of Zuckerberg with one such display.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lanier and several of his associates held up a 35-foot collage featuring hundreds of selfies Kaley had posted to Instagram, many of which used beauty filters, just as she was struggling with body-image issues. Zuckerberg looked on, as Lanier peppered him with questions about how and why a girl under the age of 13, Meta’s minimum age to create an account, was able to post to the app so obsessively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his closing argument, Lanier drew the jury’s attention to internal documents showing how top officials at Meta and Google were aware of how its products were causing harm to young people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t naysay the opportunity to make money,” Lanier said. “But when you’re making money off of kids, you have to do it responsibly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR’s Shannon Bond contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/california\">California\u003c/a> jury on Wednesday found that Meta and Google’s YouTube were to blame for the depression and anxiety of a woman who compulsively used social media as a small child, awarding her $6 million in a rare verdict holding Silicon Valley accountable for its role in fueling a youth mental health crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jurors concluded that Meta and Google should pay the woman $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta on the hook for 70% of that amount.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the verdict was read, the plaintiff, known only as Kaley, looked straight ahead stony-faced, while her lawyers shook their heads in approval. The lawyers for Meta and Google did not react to the jury’s decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade that led to industry changes against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joseph VanZandt, the co-lead lawyer for families and others suing social media companies, said Wednesday’s judgement is a step toward holding Silicon Valley giants accountable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But this verdict is bigger than one case. For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features. Today’s verdict is a referendum — from a jury, to an entire industry — that accountability has arrived,” he said in a joint statement with the plaintiff’s legal team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta and Google said they disagree with the verdict. Meta said it is weighing its legal options and Google plans to appeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said Google spokesman José Castañeda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The verdict from a Los Angeles jury over the harms of social media comes a day after a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/03/24/g-s1-115019/new-mexico-meta-children-mental-health\">pay $375 million in damages\u003c/a> for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook. The New Mexico jury found Meta responsible for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms, declaring that the tech company had flouted state consumer protection laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That trial will also enter a second phase, in May, in which a judge will decide whether Meta created a public nuisance and if the company must pay additional penalties to address harms. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he will also ask the court to force changes to make Meta’s apps safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Juries in New Mexico and California have recognized that Meta’s public deception and design features are putting children in harm’s way,” Torrez said in a statement on Wednesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12077556\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12077556\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-2000x1333.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/03/GettyImages-2261837336-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves Los Angeles Superior Court after testifying in a trial examining whether social media companies designed their platforms to be addictive to children on Feb. 18, 2026. (Photo by Apu GOMES / AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The blockbuster verdicts land against the backdrop of school districts and state lawmakers around the country limiting or banning phone use in schools. This week’s verdicts mark the first time juries have decided that tech companies are at least partially liable for online and off-line dangers kids and teenagers encounter after incessantly using social media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over a more than month-long trial in Los Angeles, the jury of five men and seven women heard competing narratives about what role social media platforms played in the mental health struggles of a woman identified as KGM, or Kaley, a now-20-year-old from Chico, Calif., who said she first started using YouTube at 6 years old and Instagram when she was 11.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawyers for KGM argued that Instagram and YouTube were deliberately designed to be addictive and the companies knew the platforms were harming young people, while the tech companies countered that their services cannot be blamed for complex mental health issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KGM’s legal team showed the jury internal documents from Meta in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives described the company’s efforts to attract and keep kids and teens on its platforms. One document said: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” and another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back to Instagram, compared with competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under questioning about these documents, Zuckerberg told the jury that keeping young users safe has always been a company priority. “If people feel like they’re not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?” Zuckerberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial is a test case, known as a bellwether, tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits brought by parents and school districts arguing that social media giants should be considered manufacturers of defective products for hooking a generation of young people to social media feeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the case, the companies insisted that there is no scientific proof that social media causes mental health issues, suggesting that they are being used as a scapegoat for the multi-faceted emotional issues children face that can have many root causes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snapchat and TikTok were also defendants in the case, but both companies \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5684196/social-media-kids-addiction-mental-health-trial\">settled\u003c/a> before the trial began.\u003cbr>\nL.A. case focused on design of social media platforms to overcome liability shield\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades, tech companies have avoided legal liability over the content that appears on their sites because of a federal law known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/994395889/how-one-mans-fight-against-an-aol-troll-sealed-the-tech-industrys-power\">Section 230\u003c/a> of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says that tech companies are not legally responsible for what their users post. This has made it difficult to bring cases over social media harms to trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the Los Angeles case, lawyers took a different approach by focusing on how tech companies built their platforms. They argued that features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, autoplay and beauty filters made apps like Instagram and YouTube equivalent to a “digital casino,” which young people found too irresistible to put down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By taking this tack, the lawyers pursued a case alleging defective design that was able to get around the high bar set by Section 230. It’s not what users post, the lawyers argued, but the very architecture of social media platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction,” said KGM’s lawyer Mark Lanier, a Texas trial attorney and part-time pastor who had a penchant for drawing on documents with markers on overhead project slides to keep the jury engaged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the course of five weeks, jurors heard from therapists, engineers, tech executives including Zuckerberg, and the plaintiff herself about just how culpable big tech companies should be for contributing to KGM’s mental health struggles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Were her issues pre-existing, or exacerbated by her home life, or deepened by social media?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta and Google fought back by underscoring the emotional and physical abuse her medical records indicated she experienced at home. Lawyers for the tech companies also hammered the point that Kaley’s own therapist never documented that social media use was a factor in her mental health problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the witness stand, KGM testified that using social media affected her self-worth, as she got further drawn into the apps and withdrew from friends and family. She developed depression and body dysmorphia, she said, as she continuously compared herself to others and used beauty filters to enhance her appearance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She so craved the validation of social media, she said, that she would run off to the bathroom at school to check the number of “likes” her posts had received. She testified that it was hard to concentrate on school because all she wanted to do was stay glued to her social media feeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The jury was not tasked with deciding whether Meta and Google had created Kaley’s mental health woes, but rather if her compulsive social media use was a “substantial factor” in her struggles and if the defective design of the platforms was the direct cause of the distress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lanier, who is known for trotting out large exhibits for trial spectacle, closed his questioning of Zuckerberg with one such display.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lanier and several of his associates held up a 35-foot collage featuring hundreds of selfies Kaley had posted to Instagram, many of which used beauty filters, just as she was struggling with body-image issues. Zuckerberg looked on, as Lanier peppered him with questions about how and why a girl under the age of 13, Meta’s minimum age to create an account, was able to post to the app so obsessively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his closing argument, Lanier drew the jury’s attention to internal documents showing how top officials at Meta and Google were aware of how its products were causing harm to young people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t naysay the opportunity to make money,” Lanier said. “But when you’re making money off of kids, you have to do it responsibly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR’s Shannon Bond contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Silicon Valley once resisted cooperating with the U.S. military. Google, Meta and OpenAI even had policies banning the use of AI in weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those days now feel like a bygone era, as Big Tech has now embraced working closely with the federal government during President Donald Trump’s second term, in large part due to lucrative contracts for military and surveillance technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This episode first aired on \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12054417/we-have-to-and-are-proud-to-big-tech-embraces-the-u-s-military\">\u003ci>Sept. 3, 2025\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Links:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/google-meta-openai-military-war.html\">The Militarization of Silicon Valley\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8870827116\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Silicon Valley once resisted cooperating with the U.S. military. Google, Meta and OpenAI even had policies banning the use of AI in weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those days now feel like a bygone era, as Big Tech has now embraced working closely with the federal government during President Donald Trump’s second term, in large part due to lucrative contracts for military and surveillance technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This episode first aired on \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12054417/we-have-to-and-are-proud-to-big-tech-embraces-the-u-s-military\">\u003ci>Sept. 3, 2025\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Links:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/google-meta-openai-military-war.html\">The Militarization of Silicon Valley\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8870827116\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>For many people, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google\u003c/a> search is the default, as obvious and unremarkable as water is to fish. That could soon change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice and a group of states,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-becerra-moves-join-federal-lawsuit-against-google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> later joined by California\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1328941/dl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">accused Google\u003c/a> of illegally stifling competition by paying to have its search engine as the default on web browsers and phones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the complaint, the DOJ argued, “Largely as a result of Google’s exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive conduct, Google in recent years has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.” Google’s monopoly in general search services thus provided the company “extraordinary power as the gateway to the internet, which it uses to promote its own web content and increase its profits.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101906758/will-the-government-break-up-google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">agreed\u003c/a>, ruling after a 10-week trial that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, during a remedies phase expected to stretch over several weeks, attorneys for the Justice Department and Google will present competing visions of how to remedy the company’s monopolistic behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Google search case, in my opinion, is the most important case about the Internet since the Internet was invented,” said Doha Mekki, \u003ca href=\"https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/staff-profile/doha-mekki-acting-assistant-attorney-general\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">formerly a top antitrust official at the DOJ\u003c/a>, and currently a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “The idea that we have to trust all of our innovation and ingenuity to this small set of companies is actually deeply un-American.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11999023\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11999023\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After a judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly on search, legal analysts are split on whether the case will break up the company or influence other antitrust lawsuits. \u003ccite>(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>During her decade-long tenure at the Justice Department, Mekki had a front-row seat to a series of major antitrust cases the agency has pursued since the first Trump Administration, including cases against \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12036411/googles-ad-dominance-is-illegal-federal-judge-rules\">Google over its advertising technology\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12035855/metas-purchased-dominance-social-media-ftc-trial\">Facebook\u003c/a> over its purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mekki argues this Google antitrust case comes at a pivotal moment when large tech companies are jostling for a lead position in the development of generative artificial intelligence. “AI has done nothing to disturb the Internet search monopoly. ChatGPT has not displaced Google search,” Mekki said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Silicon Valley giant has already said it will appeal. “The U.S. Department of Justice’s 2020 search distribution lawsuit is a backwards-looking case at a time of intense \u003ca href=\"https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/documents/AI_has_Transformed_the_Tech_Industry_-_Google_Docs.pdf\">competition\u003c/a> and unprecedented innovation. With new services like ChatGPT (and foreign competitors like DeepSeek) thriving, DOJ’s sweeping remedy proposals are both unnecessary and harmful,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s Vice President for Regulatory Affairs, \u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/doj-search-remedies-apr-2025/\">wrote\u003c/a> in a blog post.[aside postID=news_12036411 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/GettyImages-2166671481-1020x703.jpg']In the company’s early days, Google’s search service was widely praised for its credibility. But over time, the company began to prioritize ad revenue, and its highly profitable advertising business has been powered by data harvested from user activity on Google Search and Chrome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the nearly three decades since Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google as a research project at Stanford University, the company has drawn criticism because of its practice of topping search results with paid product placements and even \u003ca href=\"https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2024/04/google-ad-for-facebook-redirects-to-scam\">scam links\u003c/a>. “We heard throughout the investigation and trial of this case that Internet search is not what it used to be, that the Google search page is now more littered with ads, and there’s more routing to Google’s products and services,” Mekki said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DOJ is seeking strong remedies to address Google’s unlawful monopoly in the online search market, including proposing that Google be required to sell its Chrome browser and barring Google from entering into agreements that set its search engine as the default on devices and browsers, such as those it has with Apple. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It seems like a bad idea to have people paying tens of billions of dollars to buy placement of their search engines,” said Mark Lemley, who teaches intellectual property, antitrust and internet law at Stanford Law School. “We’d probably be better off in a world in which Apple couldn’t just auction off to the highest bidder what search engine you were going to use. But Apple’s not the defendant in this case. Google is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lemley added that Judge Mehta’s challenge is to respond to a search market where there aren’t many viable alternatives to Google search.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lemley argues that the court might consider giving consumers a choice screen from which they can select Google or one of its rivals, like Bing. “My guess is most people choose Google, and so it’s not obvious that the Google monopoly in search is much diminished if that happens, but at least we’re giving [consumers] an option up front.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For many people, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google\u003c/a> search is the default, as obvious and unremarkable as water is to fish. That could soon change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice and a group of states,\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-becerra-moves-join-federal-lawsuit-against-google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> later joined by California\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1328941/dl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">accused Google\u003c/a> of illegally stifling competition by paying to have its search engine as the default on web browsers and phones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the complaint, the DOJ argued, “Largely as a result of Google’s exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive conduct, Google in recent years has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.” Google’s monopoly in general search services thus provided the company “extraordinary power as the gateway to the internet, which it uses to promote its own web content and increase its profits.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101906758/will-the-government-break-up-google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">agreed\u003c/a>, ruling after a 10-week trial that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, during a remedies phase expected to stretch over several weeks, attorneys for the Justice Department and Google will present competing visions of how to remedy the company’s monopolistic behavior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Google search case, in my opinion, is the most important case about the Internet since the Internet was invented,” said Doha Mekki, \u003ca href=\"https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/staff-profile/doha-mekki-acting-assistant-attorney-general\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">formerly a top antitrust official at the DOJ\u003c/a>, and currently a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “The idea that we have to trust all of our innovation and ingenuity to this small set of companies is actually deeply un-American.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11999023\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11999023\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/GoogleAntitrustGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">After a judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly on search, legal analysts are split on whether the case will break up the company or influence other antitrust lawsuits. \u003ccite>(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>During her decade-long tenure at the Justice Department, Mekki had a front-row seat to a series of major antitrust cases the agency has pursued since the first Trump Administration, including cases against \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12036411/googles-ad-dominance-is-illegal-federal-judge-rules\">Google over its advertising technology\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12035855/metas-purchased-dominance-social-media-ftc-trial\">Facebook\u003c/a> over its purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mekki argues this Google antitrust case comes at a pivotal moment when large tech companies are jostling for a lead position in the development of generative artificial intelligence. “AI has done nothing to disturb the Internet search monopoly. ChatGPT has not displaced Google search,” Mekki said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Silicon Valley giant has already said it will appeal. “The U.S. Department of Justice’s 2020 search distribution lawsuit is a backwards-looking case at a time of intense \u003ca href=\"https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/documents/AI_has_Transformed_the_Tech_Industry_-_Google_Docs.pdf\">competition\u003c/a> and unprecedented innovation. With new services like ChatGPT (and foreign competitors like DeepSeek) thriving, DOJ’s sweeping remedy proposals are both unnecessary and harmful,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s Vice President for Regulatory Affairs, \u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/doj-search-remedies-apr-2025/\">wrote\u003c/a> in a blog post.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In the company’s early days, Google’s search service was widely praised for its credibility. But over time, the company began to prioritize ad revenue, and its highly profitable advertising business has been powered by data harvested from user activity on Google Search and Chrome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the nearly three decades since Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google as a research project at Stanford University, the company has drawn criticism because of its practice of topping search results with paid product placements and even \u003ca href=\"https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2024/04/google-ad-for-facebook-redirects-to-scam\">scam links\u003c/a>. “We heard throughout the investigation and trial of this case that Internet search is not what it used to be, that the Google search page is now more littered with ads, and there’s more routing to Google’s products and services,” Mekki said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The DOJ is seeking strong remedies to address Google’s unlawful monopoly in the online search market, including proposing that Google be required to sell its Chrome browser and barring Google from entering into agreements that set its search engine as the default on devices and browsers, such as those it has with Apple. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It seems like a bad idea to have people paying tens of billions of dollars to buy placement of their search engines,” said Mark Lemley, who teaches intellectual property, antitrust and internet law at Stanford Law School. “We’d probably be better off in a world in which Apple couldn’t just auction off to the highest bidder what search engine you were going to use. But Apple’s not the defendant in this case. Google is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lemley added that Judge Mehta’s challenge is to respond to a search market where there aren’t many viable alternatives to Google search.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lemley argues that the court might consider giving consumers a choice screen from which they can select Google or one of its rivals, like Bing. “My guess is most people choose Google, and so it’s not obvious that the Google monopoly in search is much diminished if that happens, but at least we’re giving [consumers] an option up front.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘Better to Buy Than Compete’: US Challenges Meta’s Market Dominance in Court",
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"content": "\u003cp>In 2012, Facebook announced a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/61601/facebook-to-buy-instagram-for-1-billion\">$1 billion deal\u003c/a> to buy Instagram, and the Federal Trade Commission approved. Two years later, Facebook \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/127028/facebooks-purchase-of-whatsapp-is-about-reaching-its-next-5-billion-users\">paid $19 billion\u003c/a> to take over WhatsApp, and once again, antitrust regulators signed off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the end of the story for federal regulators, who observed the fallout from those corporate deals, investigated and brought a case against the Menlo-Park based \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/mark-zuckerberg\">social media juggernaut\u003c/a>. Their primary argument: that Meta used those acquisitions to build and maintain a monopoly in the ad surveillance economy that the social media giant helped create.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At stake is Meta’s $1.4 trillion advertising business and the prospect of a corporate breakup the likes of which has not been seen since AT&T’s telephone monopoly was forced to split apart more than 40 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his opening statement in court on Monday, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson said Meta used its size to crush rivals. “They decided that competition was too hard, and it would be easier to buy out their rivals rather than compete with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta’s lawyer, Mark Hansen, countered that the quality of Meta’s apps “has improved on every objective measure,” adding that people use more of something when it becomes better. “That’s economics 101.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11951943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11951943\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"The Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Despite heavy lobbying by Mark Zuckerberg to avoid a trial, the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta began Monday, alleging the company violated competition laws with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. \u003ccite>(Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meta does not charge consumers money for its services, so there are no consumer price hikes to demonstrate what many consider direct evidence of monopoly power. However, the FTC will attempt to demonstrate that market power allowed Meta to diminish the quality of its product for consumers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Journalist Cory Doctorow famously coined a term for this pattern, which he calls “\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/\">enshittification\u003c/a>.” In short, Doctorow argues that tech platforms start with a compellingly enjoyable service to build their consumer base and achieve scale. But over time, platforms inevitably try to maximize profits by stuffing their products with as much advertising as possible.[aside postID=news_12031294 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/GettyImages-1327685501-1020x720.jpg']By that point, Doctorow explains, that both users and advertisers are locked in to continued use of the platform; advertisers, because they value the market share the company dominates; consumers, because it’s difficult to replicate their social network elsewhere and they’ve posted a lot of personal history that can’t easily be shifted elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine Meta is a castle, and they want to maintain their kingdom, so they build this moat around their monopoly, so no one else can access their users or take them away,” said Jen Howard, who was chief of staff at the FTC under former chair Lina Khan. Before that, Howard was at the agency when the case was opened under Joe Simons, the FTC chair during the first Trump Administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the transition from desktop to mobile, Facebook was caught “flat-footed,” Howard argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They didn’t have the technical talent to make Facebook a popular mobile app,” Howard said. “They panicked, absolutely panicked, and they decided to buy their way to the top.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta, for its part, argues the FTC’s case “ignores how the market actually works and chases a theory that doesn’t hold up in the real world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, posting on Sunday, wrote that the company has invested vast technical resources into making Instagram and WhatsApp better products, and “in reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram — if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1864361511776395438?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There has been speculation that President Trump could be convinced to abandon the trial and force federal regulators to settle with Meta after CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Zuckerberg \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5279570/meta-trump-settlement-facebook-instagram-suspensions\">agreed to pay\u003c/a> Trump $25 million to settle a suit Trump filed for being suspended from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12020383/looking-back-on-january-6-insurrection-four-years-later\">Jan. 6\u003c/a>. Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram and dialed back diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The CEO has also repeatedly visited Trump’s White House and the Mar-a-Lago club in recent months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But so far, there’s no indication that Trump is responding to the lobbying. And not just for Meta, but for Google, which \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8\">also faces an antitrust case\u003c/a> launched during Trump’s first term. Next week, in the same courthouse where Meta’s case is happening, Alphabet’s Google will argue why it shouldn’t face a breakup after a judge found it illegally monopolized the online search market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Howard calls the case a “reckoning” for Meta — and a sign the president meant what he posted when he announced Gail Slater his pick to head the Department of Justice, writing on X: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech! I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not going to be competitive if we allow these big, bloated bureaucratic businesses to continue to stifle the next generation of innovation,” Howard told KQED. “Certainly, it’s not going to come from here if we continue to protect them by allowing them to do this sort of moating of monopolies. China’s going to come, and come with something better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that score, Howard noted, antitrust advocates on both sides of the political divide have something they can agree on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 2012, Facebook announced a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/61601/facebook-to-buy-instagram-for-1-billion\">$1 billion deal\u003c/a> to buy Instagram, and the Federal Trade Commission approved. Two years later, Facebook \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/127028/facebooks-purchase-of-whatsapp-is-about-reaching-its-next-5-billion-users\">paid $19 billion\u003c/a> to take over WhatsApp, and once again, antitrust regulators signed off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the end of the story for federal regulators, who observed the fallout from those corporate deals, investigated and brought a case against the Menlo-Park based \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/mark-zuckerberg\">social media juggernaut\u003c/a>. Their primary argument: that Meta used those acquisitions to build and maintain a monopoly in the ad surveillance economy that the social media giant helped create.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At stake is Meta’s $1.4 trillion advertising business and the prospect of a corporate breakup the likes of which has not been seen since AT&T’s telephone monopoly was forced to split apart more than 40 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his opening statement in court on Monday, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson said Meta used its size to crush rivals. “They decided that competition was too hard, and it would be easier to buy out their rivals rather than compete with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta’s lawyer, Mark Hansen, countered that the quality of Meta’s apps “has improved on every objective measure,” adding that people use more of something when it becomes better. “That’s economics 101.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11951943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11951943\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"The Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/06/060123-Meta-Facebook-Instagram-AP-JC-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Despite heavy lobbying by Mark Zuckerberg to avoid a trial, the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta began Monday, alleging the company violated competition laws with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. \u003ccite>(Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meta does not charge consumers money for its services, so there are no consumer price hikes to demonstrate what many consider direct evidence of monopoly power. However, the FTC will attempt to demonstrate that market power allowed Meta to diminish the quality of its product for consumers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Journalist Cory Doctorow famously coined a term for this pattern, which he calls “\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/\">enshittification\u003c/a>.” In short, Doctorow argues that tech platforms start with a compellingly enjoyable service to build their consumer base and achieve scale. But over time, platforms inevitably try to maximize profits by stuffing their products with as much advertising as possible.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>By that point, Doctorow explains, that both users and advertisers are locked in to continued use of the platform; advertisers, because they value the market share the company dominates; consumers, because it’s difficult to replicate their social network elsewhere and they’ve posted a lot of personal history that can’t easily be shifted elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine Meta is a castle, and they want to maintain their kingdom, so they build this moat around their monopoly, so no one else can access their users or take them away,” said Jen Howard, who was chief of staff at the FTC under former chair Lina Khan. Before that, Howard was at the agency when the case was opened under Joe Simons, the FTC chair during the first Trump Administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the transition from desktop to mobile, Facebook was caught “flat-footed,” Howard argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They didn’t have the technical talent to make Facebook a popular mobile app,” Howard said. “They panicked, absolutely panicked, and they decided to buy their way to the top.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta, for its part, argues the FTC’s case “ignores how the market actually works and chases a theory that doesn’t hold up in the real world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, posting on Sunday, wrote that the company has invested vast technical resources into making Instagram and WhatsApp better products, and “in reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram — if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>There has been speculation that President Trump could be convinced to abandon the trial and force federal regulators to settle with Meta after CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Zuckerberg \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5279570/meta-trump-settlement-facebook-instagram-suspensions\">agreed to pay\u003c/a> Trump $25 million to settle a suit Trump filed for being suspended from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12020383/looking-back-on-january-6-insurrection-four-years-later\">Jan. 6\u003c/a>. Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram and dialed back diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The CEO has also repeatedly visited Trump’s White House and the Mar-a-Lago club in recent months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But so far, there’s no indication that Trump is responding to the lobbying. And not just for Meta, but for Google, which \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8\">also faces an antitrust case\u003c/a> launched during Trump’s first term. Next week, in the same courthouse where Meta’s case is happening, Alphabet’s Google will argue why it shouldn’t face a breakup after a judge found it illegally monopolized the online search market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Howard calls the case a “reckoning” for Meta — and a sign the president meant what he posted when he announced Gail Slater his pick to head the Department of Justice, writing on X: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech! I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not going to be competitive if we allow these big, bloated bureaucratic businesses to continue to stifle the next generation of innovation,” Howard told KQED. “Certainly, it’s not going to come from here if we continue to protect them by allowing them to do this sort of moating of monopolies. China’s going to come, and come with something better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that score, Howard noted, antitrust advocates on both sides of the political divide have something they can agree on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "metas-efforts-to-block-explosive-expose-in-arbitration-likely-to-fail-labor-experts-say",
"title": "Meta’s Efforts to Block Explosive Expose in Arbitration Likely to Fail, Labor Experts Say",
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"headTitle": "Meta’s Efforts to Block Explosive Expose in Arbitration Likely to Fail, Labor Experts Say | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Federal labor law enforcement is up in the air these days, thanks to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/donald-trump\"> the Trump administration’s\u003c/a> effort to downsize the government. But experts say there are a host of laws — federal and state — that protect the just-released memoir \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250391237\">\u003cem>Careless People\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism\u003c/em>, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book by former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams makes \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/books/review/careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams.html\">incendiary allegations\u003c/a> of sexual harassment and other potentially illegal behavior by top-level executives during her seven years at the social media giant based in Menlo Park. In a blurb on Amazon, the book promises “shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes,” along with depictions of “unfettered power and a rotten company culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wynn-Williams also filed\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/09/meta-china-censorship-facebook-mark-zuckerberg/\"> a whistle-blower complaint\u003c/a> to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, claiming Meta was so desperate to operate in China and ingratiate itself with the Chinese Communist Party that it was willing to censor content and shut down political dissent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, an arbitrator temporarily stopped Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, siding with Meta’s argument that she had violated the non-disparagement agreement or NDA she signed when she was an employee of the company. In the \u003ca href=\"https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Arbitration-Interim-Award.pdf\">ruling\u003c/a>, emergency arbitrator Nicholas Gowen wrote that Meta “has established a likelihood of success on the merits of its contractual non-disparagement claim against Respondent Wynn-Williams and that immediate and irreparable loss will result in the absence of emergency relief.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Meta spokesperson wrote KQED, “We took immediate legal action due to the false and defamatory nature of the allegations.” They added, “This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives. Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12020607\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1100px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12020607\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1100\" height=\"733\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg 1100w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, ‘Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,’ in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 31, 2024. \u003ccite>(Brendan Smialowski/AFP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Some former Meta employees are coming forward to defend the company, including Mike Rognlien, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.threads.net/@badmikeyt/post/DHHfpWQykPC?xmt=AQGz0MND3an--2-q2sfIURuFSqWVXPJHKm2FCxNZRrV_lA\">wrote on Threads\u003c/a>, “People are so thirsty for anything disparaging to Meta. I sat next to Sarah for 18 months when we both worked in the New York office and we were both working closely with Sheryl Sandberg at the time. Never a word of this was mentioned, and we talked shit about loooooots of stuff. I have recently/publicly taken meta task for everything that they’re doing to dismantle dei, but I didn’t have to make up a thing to tell the story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arbitration is commonly understood to favor employers over employees, but “an arbitrator cannot violate the law,” said Catherine Fisk of UC Berkeley’s Law School, where she teaches employment and labor law. She also works as an arbitrator in labor management matters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To the extent that [Wynn-Williams] is criticizing working conditions, employees have had a right to criticize working conditions under federal labor law for, lo, these 90 years. And unless — and until — Congress repeals that statute, or the [the National Labor Relations Board] overturns its decision, or the Supreme Court overturns that decision, it’s protected concerted activities,” Fisk told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_11860458 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/02/1369_transform-2-1020x680.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford labor law professor William Gould, who served as chair of the NLRB from 1994 to 1998, wrote in an email, “The Biden National Labor Relations Board has held that an employer cannot lawfully condition a severance arrangement upon a non disclosure non disparagement promise agreement.” While Gould acknowledged the ruling is likely to be reversed by Trump appointees, the Biden ruling remains intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California law also makes it clear \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/973439404/it-really-is-a-gag-order-california-may-limit-nondisclosure-agreements\">workers can talk about sexual harassment\u003c/a> or gender-related misconduct without fear of reprisal from their employer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fisk added the arbitrator, Gowen, has no jurisdiction over the publishing company, although Meta could sue or threaten to sue the publisher for defamation. Macmillan Publishers, which published the book under its Flatiron Books imprint, posted on\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1271075701251400&set=a.820130836345891\"> Facebook\u003c/a>, “We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2018, Meta said it would no longer force employees to\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/technology/facebook-arbitration-harassment.html\"> settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration\u003c/a>. In 2022, Meta’s board of directors wrote in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680122000043/meta2022definitiveproxysta.htm\">shareholder report\u003c/a>, “We do not require or encourage our personnel to remain silent about harassment or discrimination.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, the NLRB ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Federal labor law enforcement is up in the air these days, thanks to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/donald-trump\"> the Trump administration’s\u003c/a> effort to downsize the government. But experts say there are a host of laws — federal and state — that protect the just-released memoir \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250391237\">\u003cem>Careless People\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism\u003c/em>, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book by former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams makes \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/books/review/careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams.html\">incendiary allegations\u003c/a> of sexual harassment and other potentially illegal behavior by top-level executives during her seven years at the social media giant based in Menlo Park. In a blurb on Amazon, the book promises “shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes,” along with depictions of “unfettered power and a rotten company culture.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wynn-Williams also filed\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/09/meta-china-censorship-facebook-mark-zuckerberg/\"> a whistle-blower complaint\u003c/a> to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, claiming Meta was so desperate to operate in China and ingratiate itself with the Chinese Communist Party that it was willing to censor content and shut down political dissent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, an arbitrator temporarily stopped Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, siding with Meta’s argument that she had violated the non-disparagement agreement or NDA she signed when she was an employee of the company. In the \u003ca href=\"https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Arbitration-Interim-Award.pdf\">ruling\u003c/a>, emergency arbitrator Nicholas Gowen wrote that Meta “has established a likelihood of success on the merits of its contractual non-disparagement claim against Respondent Wynn-Williams and that immediate and irreparable loss will result in the absence of emergency relief.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Meta spokesperson wrote KQED, “We took immediate legal action due to the false and defamatory nature of the allegations.” They added, “This book is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives. Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12020607\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1100px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12020607\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1100\" height=\"733\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy.jpg 1100w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, ‘Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,’ in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 31, 2024. \u003ccite>(Brendan Smialowski/AFP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Some former Meta employees are coming forward to defend the company, including Mike Rognlien, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.threads.net/@badmikeyt/post/DHHfpWQykPC?xmt=AQGz0MND3an--2-q2sfIURuFSqWVXPJHKm2FCxNZRrV_lA\">wrote on Threads\u003c/a>, “People are so thirsty for anything disparaging to Meta. I sat next to Sarah for 18 months when we both worked in the New York office and we were both working closely with Sheryl Sandberg at the time. Never a word of this was mentioned, and we talked shit about loooooots of stuff. I have recently/publicly taken meta task for everything that they’re doing to dismantle dei, but I didn’t have to make up a thing to tell the story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arbitration is commonly understood to favor employers over employees, but “an arbitrator cannot violate the law,” said Catherine Fisk of UC Berkeley’s Law School, where she teaches employment and labor law. She also works as an arbitrator in labor management matters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To the extent that [Wynn-Williams] is criticizing working conditions, employees have had a right to criticize working conditions under federal labor law for, lo, these 90 years. And unless — and until — Congress repeals that statute, or the [the National Labor Relations Board] overturns its decision, or the Supreme Court overturns that decision, it’s protected concerted activities,” Fisk told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford labor law professor William Gould, who served as chair of the NLRB from 1994 to 1998, wrote in an email, “The Biden National Labor Relations Board has held that an employer cannot lawfully condition a severance arrangement upon a non disclosure non disparagement promise agreement.” While Gould acknowledged the ruling is likely to be reversed by Trump appointees, the Biden ruling remains intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California law also makes it clear \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/973439404/it-really-is-a-gag-order-california-may-limit-nondisclosure-agreements\">workers can talk about sexual harassment\u003c/a> or gender-related misconduct without fear of reprisal from their employer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fisk added the arbitrator, Gowen, has no jurisdiction over the publishing company, although Meta could sue or threaten to sue the publisher for defamation. Macmillan Publishers, which published the book under its Flatiron Books imprint, posted on\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1271075701251400&set=a.820130836345891\"> Facebook\u003c/a>, “We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2018, Meta said it would no longer force employees to\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/technology/facebook-arbitration-harassment.html\"> settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration\u003c/a>. In 2022, Meta’s board of directors wrote in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680122000043/meta2022definitiveproxysta.htm\">shareholder report\u003c/a>, “We do not require or encourage our personnel to remain silent about harassment or discrimination.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, the NLRB ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg \u003ca href=\"https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announced Tuesday\u003c/a> that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact checking organizations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video, Zuckerberg said the company’s content moderation approach resulted too often in “censorship.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta set up one of the most extensive \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/15/505728377/facebook-details-its-new-plan-to-combat-fake-news-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">partnerships with fact checkers\u003c/a> after the 2016 presidential election, in which \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/18/903616315/senate-releases-final-report-on-russias-interference-in-2016-election\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Russia spread false claims\u003c/a> on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/19/502692075/misinformation-on-facebook-zuckerberg-lists-ways-of-fighting-fake-news\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">falsehoods and misleading information\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/924625825/dont-censor-stop-the-hoaxes-facebook-twitter-face-a-catch-22\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">censorship\u003c/a>. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol but eventually \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1146961818/trump-meta-facebook-instagram-ban-ends\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">allowed him to return\u003c/a> ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/11/10/1211929764/election-false-claims-social-media-cisa-trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta said instead of working with third-party fact checkers, it would shift to a “community notes” program where users write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts. That’s similar to the approach Elon Musk has championed on X, the platform formerly known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/965839888/twitters-birdwatch-aims-to-crowdsource-fight-against-misinformation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on automated systems except for “illegal and high-severity violations,” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The company’s U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.[aside label=\"More Meta News\" postID=\"news_11965392,news_12008143,news_11968723\"]Fact checkers who have worked with Meta for years pushed back against Zuckerberg’s accusation of bias.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"ad-header \">\n\u003cp>“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third-party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta, up until this morning, has always appreciated the independence of fact checkers,” Adair said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Meta pays fact checkers for their work, some fact checking organizations — most of which are non-profits — heavily rely on the company to survive. “We’ll see fewer fact checking reports published and fewer fact checkers working,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of International Fact Checking Network.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the fact checking programs on social media have been really positive for helping to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. And to see it so quickly curtailed this way without a whole lot of discussion is disappointing,” Holan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans welcomed the announcement as validating their long-running claims that Meta and other tech companies are biased against conservatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta finally admits to censoring speech … what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1876614145275015357\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted on X\u003c/a> on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg \u003ca href=\"https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announced Tuesday\u003c/a> that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact checking organizations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video, Zuckerberg said the company’s content moderation approach resulted too often in “censorship.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta set up one of the most extensive \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/15/505728377/facebook-details-its-new-plan-to-combat-fake-news-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">partnerships with fact checkers\u003c/a> after the 2016 presidential election, in which \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/18/903616315/senate-releases-final-report-on-russias-interference-in-2016-election\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Russia spread false claims\u003c/a> on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/19/502692075/misinformation-on-facebook-zuckerberg-lists-ways-of-fighting-fake-news\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">falsehoods and misleading information\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/924625825/dont-censor-stop-the-hoaxes-facebook-twitter-face-a-catch-22\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">censorship\u003c/a>. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol but eventually \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1146961818/trump-meta-facebook-instagram-ban-ends\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">allowed him to return\u003c/a> ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/11/10/1211929764/election-false-claims-social-media-cisa-trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta said instead of working with third-party fact checkers, it would shift to a “community notes” program where users write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts. That’s similar to the approach Elon Musk has championed on X, the platform formerly known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/965839888/twitters-birdwatch-aims-to-crowdsource-fight-against-misinformation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on automated systems except for “illegal and high-severity violations,” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The company’s U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Fact checkers who have worked with Meta for years pushed back against Zuckerberg’s accusation of bias.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"ad-header \">\n\u003cp>“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third-party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta, up until this morning, has always appreciated the independence of fact checkers,” Adair said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Meta pays fact checkers for their work, some fact checking organizations — most of which are non-profits — heavily rely on the company to survive. “We’ll see fewer fact checking reports published and fewer fact checkers working,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of International Fact Checking Network.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the fact checking programs on social media have been really positive for helping to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. And to see it so quickly curtailed this way without a whole lot of discussion is disappointing,” Holan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans welcomed the announcement as validating their long-running claims that Meta and other tech companies are biased against conservatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta finally admits to censoring speech … what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1876614145275015357\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted on X\u003c/a> on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
"airtime": "SUN 9pm-10pm",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.commonwealthclub.org/podcasts",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"id": "here-and-now",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/hiddenbrain.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
"subscribe": {
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Science-Podcasts/Hidden-Brain-p787503/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510308/podcast.xml"
}
},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
"imageAlt": "KQED Hyphenación",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/xtTd",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id73801135",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/M4f5",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Planet-Money-p164680/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Political Breakdown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"subscribe": {
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0c2d153-ad36-4c8d-901d-f1da6a724824/political-breakdown",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown",
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