Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the iPhone Bluetooth headset, a gadget we will tragically not be talking about anymore on this podcast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hey buddy, do you want to hear my whole riff about how AI is Bluetooth? I can do it. I got like a hot ten on how AI is Bluetooth.
I think you've done this on this show.
I have absolutely done it. It's like it's my favorite thing. I'm popping up in diners across the country being like, do you know that is kind of like Bluetooth? Like everybody knew what Bluetooth was going to be, but they had Bluetooth headsets for their... I did it. I really appreciate the extent to which Bluetooth just gets dragged all over the broadcast. Bluetooth is the sort of thing that is like not that important to most of people's lives. It just makes your headphones...
Totally true. Bluetooth is totally important to everybody all the time. It's like a magical technology that exists, but also it breaks a little bit and so you see the limits of human ingenuity.
It's technology, baby. All right, we have a lot to do this week. And we're doing it at 10:00 in the morning on Thursday, which is... the vibes are very different when we do the show in the morning. Because you have somewhere to go, which we're going to talk about in a second, because you having somewhere to go is actually news this week right now. We're going to talk about some Apple stuff. Next week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. We are doing a bunch of stuff. We're going to talk about something you and I have been doing to kick off this whole thing. We have some news about Meta and YouTube in court, on trial. Big important verdicts coming in that we have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of lightning round stuff to do. A truly remarkable Brendan Carr is a dummy week in store. Get ready. I am particularly excited about this one. But Nilay, first we have to start with you. You have two very important life updates. Both of which are very relevant to the Vergecast and not just because they're you. I'm genuinely serious. You have a flight to get on today.
It's 10:00 a.m. You have a flight at 5:30. Honest to God, what time are you going to leave to get to the airport?
I'm going to leave at 1:00 p.m. The airport is half an hour away from my house.
So you're going to get there with four hours to spare, basically.
Yeah, that's basically my plan.
And you are not normally an early-to-the-airport guy. You're like a roll in, walk straight through security and onto the plane at the last second.
Well, I got to be honest, that's the version of me without children.
The version of me with children is like a newbie. Like no idea what's going on, first day. Like, how does a stroller work? Like, that's bad. The version of me without children, real pro. No bags, everything in a giant backpack that just slides through security in and out. I like to do one-day trips. I know you like to do one-day trips because we both have children. We're trying to get back. That person has been utterly disrupted by the TSA.
So that, you know, everyone knows this, the Department of Homeland Security is shut down. Airport lines across the country are out of control. There's a big argument over refunding DHS and paying TSA agents once again. That comes down to whether or not ICE agents can wear masks and other things Democrats want. There's some negotiation back and forth. We have a great piece on the site about the push, the Republican push to privatize the TSA, which was actually part of Project 2025, whether or not all this is going to lead to that at various airports across the country. And then our excellent reporter Gabby Devay was actually at JFK figuring out what ICE is doing at the airports, which, spoiler alert, standing around is what they're doing. I mean, because obviously you don't want people who are untrained to do security training. So like that's a bomb. Like that's that you don't want that. So there's some amount of maybe that will actually start happening as training occurs. All of this means that I'm flying to Chicago today and I'm going to the airport four hours early, which means we're recording the Vergecast in the morning. So if anything breaks this afternoon, you can blame the TSA.
Well, not the TSA. They're not getting paid. You can blame the Trump administration holding TSA hostage for the Save America Act for this like crazy voter ID Act. Anyhow, that's why we're chasing.
Yeah. It is just full chaos out there. And it is like add this to the list of sort of really visceral outcomes of weird political machinations, right? It's the sort of thing that is like, oh, it is blindingly obvious what all of this chaos is doing because you missed your flight. You know what I mean? Like often politics is the sort of thing that happens and it is not all that obvious how it trickles down to like your minute-to-minute life. This is the kind of thing that is very obvious and how whoever you want to blame for it. And the answer is kind of everybody.
It is all bad out there. No end in sight is basically the answer. And I mean, we've done the Vergecast and you know, wrapped up at 4:00 and I have blazed out of here and gotten on a flight to Chicago at 5:15.
It's just a thing you can do. And that is not what's happening today. By the way, I'm going to Chicago for a fun thing. The American Bar Association invited me to speak at their tech show, which is where they talk about tech and the law. So if you're in Chicago, you're probably listening to this on a Friday. I'm at the ABA tech show. I'm going to do the keynote and talk about AI and the law and all that stuff coming together. I'd love to see you. Come say hi. They're like, "What do you want to talk about with AI?" And I was like, "Ah." And I have a lot of ideas. So the keynote might be like six hours long. But that's what I'm doing. I think it'll be really fun. And there's a lot going on with AI and the law. Just to give you a quick preview, I think a lot of people react to the law like it's software code.
Because it's like structured language and you issue commands to a system, but instead of a computer there's like a judge who's 800 years old whose brain has been cooked by Facebook memes, and those are different things. And so you see how much sort of the AI companies are like, well, we did it to software, what's some other structured language we can go screw with? And like the legal system is right there.
And like contracts are boring, no one reads those. And yeah, so that's the talk. If you are in Chicago, if you happen to be a lawyer and you want to go to the ABA tech show, I'll be there. I'd love to see you.
Love that. It's still weird to me, by the way, that people invite you to do like keynote speeches. It's like there's this abstract way that I understand that you are like very important, but you're also just like the doofus I make a podcast with all the time. Do you know what I mean? It's just like it's nice to occasionally remember that other people also like you and somewhere out there someone thinks you're impressive. We're going to see how like lawyers feel about me at the end of the speech. So who knows? But we're going to give it a shot.
Do you try to sound like a lawyer in front of a bunch of lawyers?
Have you thought about like what's the cadence of speech in front of a bunch of lawyers?
Uh, slow, because you got to fill the time. Uh, hello. Welcome to Chicago. Um, a little bit. I mean, you know, you try to reach people where they are. Look, the idea that I was ever a lawyer is like deeply hilarious to me. Like I was just, I was not good at this. And so I don't even, I don't pretend that I can do what these folks do. What I think that they want me to talk about is there's a bunch of stuff happening with AI in the worlds that we talk about every day. And it is, it's hard in every little bubble to see outside the bubble. And in particular because I have a little bit of background, you know, married to a lawyer, all this stuff, like I can see in both sides of the coin a little bit. Yeah. I mean, that's a conversation, but it really like if you think AI is doing weird stuff to other industries, it is doing particularly weird stuff to the law, and you kind of see it bubble out all the time.
Yeah. Well, we have a bunch of law stuff to talk about actually. So this is good warm-up for you. But we should talk a little bit about Apple 50. I should say right up front that if you want to hear Nilay and I spend the better part of two hours just litigating Apple products and which are the good ones, we have a whole separate episode of the Vergecast that is available for subscribers only. This is, I think, the first time ever we've done a subscriber-only.
And I cannot tell you if this is a benefit or a punishment.
Because it really is two hours of me and David just fully crashing out trying to make a, not even rank the list, just make a list of 50 Apple products.
It is the most let's-name-some-guys broadcast we've ever done. And I had a blast. But if you get three minutes in and you're like, they're just saying the names of laptops to each other, you can turn it off because emotionally saying the names of laptops to each other.
Yeah. But anyway, so the reason for that is that this is about to be the 50th anniversary of Apple. Apple is doing a bunch of stuff. David Pogue wrote a very good book. Have you read any of his book by the way?
I've not read his book. I have a galley and I know he just did an event with Joanna which seems like it went really well.
Yeah, it's very good. And holy god is it deep. And it is the kind of book that is like if you've read a lot of these Apple history books, there's a lot of stuff in there, but he also found a lot of new stuff. Tells the story kind of from beginning to end in a way that is neat and cool. Good book. Highly recommend it. Apple's doing a lot of stuff. Tim Cook is like rocking out to Alicia Keys at Grand Central these days. But one of the things that we're doing for our coverage is we built this very cool ranker. Shout out to Graham Mackery and our team and the whole design team for putting all this together where you can rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. Is that a very fraught thing for a bunch of reasons? It sure is. So what you and I did was we went through and our job was to just select the 50, not put them in order, but just take every Apple product that has ever existed and winnow them down to 50. And if you go to theverge.com, I believe starting right now, and we'll put it in the container post or the show notes for this episode. It'll be all over the Verge. If you go to theverge.com, you will not be able to miss it for the next week. You can then go in and do the ranking system, and it's actually very cool. You're going to be able to basically have two things pitted against each other and you will pick the one that you like the best and it'll just give you sort of like I forget how many thousands of possible combinations there are and as a group we are all going to rank the top 50 together. So you'll get to see the live ranking of how all of these things stack up against each other. It's very cool and very exciting.
The ranker is actually really cool. It uses the ELO ranking system which was designed for chess players. We kind of had to modify it a little bit to make it work for 50 Apple products. But basically, everything gets a little score and then as they go head-to-head, the scores go up and down, which is why you can watch the live ranking.
I sat there looking at an iMac G4 and the original iPod yesterday.
And it's just like choose. It's like I can't, you know,
There's no getting around that. But you get to see all those matchups together. The hard part was making the list of 50 products.
Yeah. Which again, you can listen to Nilay and I spend a lot of time doing, but I'm curious. You and I, this is now the third time you and I have sat here and together. We're not doing this together.
I want to know what you think. I have one product specifically in mind that I'm like, I'm pretty sure a bunch of people are going to be mad at me about this that it isn't even on the list.
I will put, we'll put the whole list on the site so you can see what they all are. Me reading 50 Apple products to you in a row is probably not great podcast, but I'm curious. Is there anything you think of that is not on the list that you're like people are going to be pissed?
No. There's one that's on the list that every time I saw it when we were testing the ranker I was like why did we pick this one? It's the Intel Mac Mini. Like who get out of here? Like every time I saw it you lose. All right. See this is why two hours you can listen in two hours.
The Intel Mac Mini is when the Mac Mini became good.
Mac Mini. I'm on a Mac Mini right now.
By the way, the other very fun thing you can do in the ranker is you can hit the little about button and read the blurbs David and I wrote for every single product. And boy did my friend David and I argue in a Google sheet.
There are like three or four where I found them and it's just like, oh, Nilay mine, and then wrote about how much he loved the Titanium PowerBook. And that's just what this is.
That's what happened. And I was like going through, I was like, I can't do them all. So you can see there's this ranker is a lot like there's a lot about David and I's 15-year relationship that's somehow built in this ranker.
Very much so. Yeah, we had a blast. I will say the only one that keeps coming to my mind is there's going to be people who are like why isn't the iPhone 3GS in here and to all of you I want to say that's not correct.
You're wrong and that's fine and I love you. Go rank Apple products. So here's what I want. We're going to put all 50 in a list somewhere. Go do our ranker, but also if you want to make and send us your own top 50, I want to see them.
We'll give you the list and you can just rank them however you want.
I want to see all of them and then you and I next week, we're each going to make our lists independently and then we're going to see what everybody on the site does collectively and then we're just going to fight to the death about it. I don't know what's going to happen.
We're going to do a fifth turn of these 50 Apple products.
I'm really excited. I haven't thought about the G3 Power Mac this much since it came out. Like since I physically had one in a computer lab in school.
At some point in this whole process, I did like three hours of research on Bondi Blue as a concept.
It might be. I can't confirm that. But anyway, we're going to have tons of great coverage. The Ranker is just one piece of it. We have a bunch of really fun stories coming. Jason Snell has written some stuff for us. A bunch of other people on staff have written stuff. It's great. It's going to be a really fun series. Guess who wrote the piece titled, "For $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air." I won't say, but just take a guess.
Who's to say? And did it cause that person a brief existential crisis about the course of their career? Also, who's to say?
But yeah, it's good stuff. I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to be a fun week. We also have a bunch more Apple stuff coming on Tuesday's show. We have a version history about the Macintosh with you and John Gruber and me coming this weekend. It's going to be a very Apple week. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.
It's going to be a lot of fun. And I have some personal news.
Yeah. It's very important. And I realize what people feel when people say you have some personal news. And I want you to feel that because it rises to that occasion, I think.
Like hard U-turn back to the thing I ran from.
No, no, no. The driver board to turn my 5K iMac into a monitor has cleared customs from Shenzhen where it was made and is on its way. It's on a UPS truck to my house.
What is this piece of equipment?
There's lots of them, my friend. When you're like, I'm going to turn my 5K iMac into a monitor, you enter a subculture full of people who do this, who buy all of the boards and test them, who have deep ideas about whether or not you want to convert the speakers and the microphone as well. There are companies that specialize in this. There are model numbers. It's good. I spent a full day. So the first thing you do is you got to open the iMac and figure out the model number of the display in your iMac.
Which I think is just what keeps people from doing it because it's like steps. You can't just do it in an afternoon. You have to take the thing apart and then you have an iMac with a floppy display that has to be tucked in a corner with tape on it while you order it apart from China and then it takes more than a week to get to your house. I literally, I think this is what kept me from doing it. There's like a lot of these boards. I bought one from what appears to be a company as opposed to some guys. It's a Stone Tascam R1820. It can do everything. It has like a speaker driver in it. You can like redo the speakers. I'm not going to do any of that. But it's the one that doesn't need a fan and it can just run off one HDMI. So that's what I wanted. I'm very excited about this. I'm probably going to blow up this computer. Those are the two feelings that I have.
Have you done the research on like what kind of labor from you this process is actually going to require.
Easy. I mean, the hardest part is cutting the adhesive that holds the glass to the shell. And it is scary. Like that part sucks. But I did it with like a guitar pick.
They sell little pizza cutters.
Like you can, it's literally a wheel and a handle but you can like pizza cut the display. It's very cute. But yeah once you get it open you just take all the parts out. You figure out where to mount the board and you plug in the two cables and you're like off to the races.
Okay. So this is a lot of confidence which brings me to the most important question. Are you willing to live stream yourself doing this?
And I would like to just issue my conspiracy theory because I love watching a teardown video. Love it. It's some of my favorite stuff to do. I also love watching like the videos where people like sandblast old tools and like fix them up again.
It's all very good. Like the thing where it's like this is rusty and now it's not. I'll watch that forever.
I mean I'm like I should buy a sandblaster. I don't whatever. So I love watching teardown video and my conspiracy theory belief is that everybody who makes teardown videos buys at least two so they can practice on the first one so the actual teardown video is good when they make it. And so we are, I do not have two iMacs to practice on. So we're going to do it and then we'll talk about it. We'll see if it works. But I sat there with the Studio Display XDR in my cart because it was $100 off at Amazon and I was like I can't, I have to try, I have to.
You made a lot of promises about $1 off.
I did make a lot of promises about $1, but
Yeah, Amazon has it for $100 off. I came very close. I almost got peer pressured, but I was like I got to do it. I have to try.
Well, this is great for you because now it's all upside, right? Either this works and suddenly you've turned your iMac into a terrific display or oh no, whoops, did my best. Got to go buy a $3,000 monitor.
Yeah, that's kind of how this feels.
I have to say, by the way, the people out in the ether that I know who you would expect to be buying a $3,300 monitor are all buying it. And everybody seems to love this thing.
Yeah, I know. I know. Like, this is going to go for me.
But like you remember the first Studio Display was kind of a mess in certain ways. Like a lot about the screen was really great, but like the webcam really sucked. It just wasn't a perfectly executed product.
No, I think I gave that thing like a six.
Yeah, the feelings about the XDR are like rapturous so far.
I don't need to know this information. All I need to do is take apart my 10-year-old iMac with a little pizza cutter and a guitar pick and put in this like suspiciously sourced driver board that came to my house from China and then be happy. What could possibly go wrong?
This is good. I'm happy for you. I think this is going to go really well. And I'm going to come to your house and live stream it while you do it. It's going to be great whether you like it or not.
I'm just saying this is the news. Apple's turning 50 and I'm finally doing the iMac project. A lot of people said I wouldn't do it. Here I am.
Are these two things connected?
No, it was really the like am I going to carry the $3,200 box past my baby who has to go to college? Like I don't think I am. That's where that goes.
Wait, also one more Nilay life update. Did you actually decide to keep your MacBook Neo? I confess I returned mine. We should just say this out loud. I took it back. I attempted to give it to Anna, my wife, because I have a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air and I thus have no use for a MacBook Neo. But I gave it to Anna because she has like a kind of crummy Samsung Chromebook that works fine for most things, but every once in a while she needs proper Excel basically and is like annoyed at using a Chromebook. So I was like, "Look, here's the Neo. Do you just want this?" And she basically looked at it and was like, "I have no use for this." Like she reminded me about whenever you have tried to upgrade Becky's Kindle and she's just like, "What do you mean? I already have a Kindle. It does the thing." That was Anna's response to me trying to give her the Neo. So I took the Neo back. I took it back and basically swapped the Neo and an iPhone 16 for an iPhone 17 and a gift card. And now here we are.
But you, I think, are potentially keeping the Neo.
Today would be the day. Two weeks are up. So it's staying. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to run either OpenClaw or Clawed computer use on it.
And just have some agents and see what happens. I've decided that I have no feelings about Instagram as a platform, especially after the news this week, which we'll talk about. And so I'm like, what if I just automate my social media in some way?
Interesting. Like I should take some runs at using these tools for actual purposes, not just I set up an agent and made it send me a digest of the news. Like having done that, I'm like, this means nothing to me.
Right. Like I think it's important for us to use the tools and like have deep familiarity with them particularly. So when the CEOs of the companies come on the show, I'm like, I've used your tools and I have thoughts about them. Like that connection is important to me. So I think I'm going to use my Neo as like an OpenClaw machine. And I don't know exactly what it means to automate my social media. Like I'm not going to automate my Bluesky. My Bluesky is where I'm going to just like have feelings, which as you can see. But we generate like a lot of video clips and they need to go to a lot of places. And I'm very curious to see if I can actually make a workflow like that happen on my personal accounts and what that just honestly what that feels like because we are up against just like absolute machines that do that all day long. And so one, I think we need to understand how the modern environment works and like what our competitors are doing. And two, I think there's something important about what it feels like to have an agent running that I want to experience again outside of the like I set it up and like that's neat to like actually try to do a thing. So we're going to see. I think the Neo is that's what it's going to be for, which is absolutely not what Apple is selling Neo for.
No, it's precisely the opposite of what they want to sell,
But you need a cheap computer to do it and I have one and yeah, I could do it with a mini and like, you know, screen share into a mini.
Sure. But you like put that all together and you're like you're out of Neo and you might as well just keep the Neo.
I like it. Yeah, we're going to have to check back in on this because I'm particularly curious about how your trust with the thing develops.
That's the main thing I'm curious about. Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of people about this and there is this weird transition you go through where you go from I have an agent that I have to sit and watch and actually it's not saving me any time because I'm babysitting the thing all the way down to like do I fully completely trust this thing to post to my Instagram and it works and I don't think about it anymore because like that's the success state right is like this thing actually works on my behalf and it is officially no longer my problem and the road to get there looks very different for everybody on every individual thing. And I think for you in particular, I'm very curious to see how far down that path you're actually able to get over time.
This is the next segment about how you feel about social platforms.
But I think what that's going to run into is do I care about Instagram? Like can I just be like robot do Instagram and not have feelings about that? Well, I don't know. I'm very curious to see how that dynamic plays out. But you're right. The main thing that I want to experience is how much trust can you actually put in a system like this? Because I think it's important. I know people have lots of feelings about AI when they listen to the show. They have lots of feelings about AI on The Verge in general. But I actually think it's very important for us as reporters to use the tools.
And like this is a tool, but I want to do some experiments with some stakes. Oh no, I said stakes. Now the AI editor is going to... Now the Grammarly AI is going to make sure that you edit the smartwatch headlines. Good, David. Anyway, I want to do some experiments with some stakes with, you know, that things can go wrong for real to feel what that's like.
Yeah, I like it. All right, speaking of that, let's get into some of the news. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we got to talk about these social media trials. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. So the big news of the week, and Nilay, you have been kind of hammering for months about how big this news was going to be, is these two trials both against Meta and in many ways about the concept of social media in general. That both came to a head this week, one in New Mexico, one in California. They're different in their actual substance, but in a very real way, this is sort of a referendum moment on not just is social media bad, but how do we litigate the ways in which it is bad? I feel like we should start with this trial in LA, right? This feels like the more important one. Would you agree?
We should start with the one in LA just because that ruling is against YouTube and Meta, particularly Instagram, although most of its other products as well. And the one in New Mexico is very specifically about Meta. They have different theories and it's important. So they're both important in that the floodgates to sue these companies for making bad products that hurt people are now wide open and that's why everyone keeps calling them bellwether cases. You see that word in every single news report including ours that these are bellwether cases. And what that means is a bunch of state attorneys general, a bunch of consumer advocacy groups, a bunch of parents got together and said, "What are the cases we can bring against these companies that have the best facts, the most sympathetic plaintiffs, the people got hurt the most and test this theory of the law, right? And if we can win, then we can bring a whole bunch of other cases." That's why they're called bellwether cases. So these are trial balloons. The one in California. Again, the facts are bad. The young woman, she's 20 now. She goes by KGM, just her initials, to protect her identity. The facts are she started using YouTube at age six. She started using Instagram at age nine. She blames these platforms on all kinds of mental health issues, including body dysmorphia. She was asked specifically about them. It was really hard for Instagram and YouTube to put her on the stand and cross-examine her. They're like, "Your mental health issues are your issues." Right? This was like never going to go well, right? Like they were always going to lose these cases. You put Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri and Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, on the stand and you're like, "Do your products hurt people?" And they're like, "No." And then you show them all of these documents where they study teen usage, where they know that there's harm, where they compare their products to cigarettes, and then you have a jury full of regular people, and it's like, "How do you feel about Instagram? Do you think it's good? Do you think it hurt these people or didn't?" And there was not a jury in the world that was not going to find them guilty of designing products to serve people.
Well, it was important that it was a jury, right? Because this case just was different in so many ways from the cases that we've seen before. Again, in the particulars of the facts of the case, in the way that it was constructed in front of a jury, like you're right that Mark Zuckerberg can sit in front of Congress or a judge and say stuff and it can go a lot of ways, but we've seen Mark Zuckerberg talk. He's not going to win over a jury in this case. And there were also, Lauren Feiner did a really great job of covering this case for us.
Yeah, she was in the courtroom.
Yeah, she was in the courtroom a lot. And she talked to like there were parents of kids who have died and gone through horrible things in large part and they blame social media for those things. Like I think you're right that the social media companies were always going to lose this case. But I want to come back to the idea of this.
Wait, can I just give you one vignette from Lauren's piece? People should go read it. Lauren has a piece about the parents reacting to Zuckerberg. It's brutal. Like truly brutal to read. It is just a heartbreaking piece to read because it's a bunch of parents who have lost their children to various harms on social media platform. And there's one parent in that piece who's quoted saying, "I saw Mark Zuckerberg's curly hair. My son had curly hair before he killed himself. It was beautiful. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't deserve to have his hair." Like that is just a fully devastating emotional reaction from a parent to seeing the person who they blame for the death of their child.
And like you know I think you know Meta had to make the arguments that it wasn't them like they didn't reach into an individual and do these things but these cases were about are the products designed to be addictive to foster these behaviors? Do you know that you're doing it right? Are you aware that you are causing these harms? And there I just don't think there was ever going to be a jury that would look at the evidence presented in these cases and say anything and think about their own experiences with these products and find anything other than yes, you knew it and you did it anyway. So you've mentioned the product design piece of this and I want you to like put on your lawyer hat for me for a minute here because like we talk about Section 230 on this show a lot. And one of the things that came up over and over in all of the discussion about this is like these companies get out of these trials because they're like, "Well, we're so sorry for this bad thing that happened to you because of Section 230. We're actually not responsible for the content posted on our platforms." Right? And a lot of the stories in Lauren's story from the parents and a lot of the things that come up are like my kid tried to emulate a video that they watched on YouTube and harmed themselves or died. And those stories are awful and that's very different from the way that this became litigated. Like these trials, as far as I understand, and this one in LA in particular, went way out of its way to not be about content on the platforms. Can you explain sort of the legal avenue they went down with these and why it seemed to get away from the Section 230 fight?
They needed to get away from the Section 230 fight. And I think there's a lot of consternation about whether Section 230 survives trials like this, survives this attack. By the way, there are bills in Congress right now that would just straight up repeal Section 230. The idea that we need to regulate the social media companies is bipartisan. It is enormously popular with the American people and it just keeps running into both Section 230 and I think very importantly the First Amendment.
So you just have that problem and I'm calling it a problem because everyone agrees that there should be some control over what social media companies are able to do. And you know I think government tech regulations are bad. You've heard me say it on the show a million times. You just run into, well, the First Amendment pretty much prevents you from telling them what they have to moderate.
Yeah, I can say mean things about you on the internet.
They can say mean things about you because of the First Amendment.
And then 230 says Facebook is not responsible for the content of what you users post on Facebook. So if you go on Facebook and you're like, I hate my neighbor. They've done some thing that they think is defamatory and then Facebook spreads it to 10 million people. The neighbor can sue you, but they can't sue Facebook, even though Facebook is the one that amplified and distributed the message. So this is a real tension, and it connects to the First Amendment very directly, right? If you change Section 230, well, the government is going to make Facebook liable for a lot of speech it wasn't liable for before. That's going to change how Facebook moderates. It's going to change how Facebook operates. There are some First Amendment concerns tied up in that. I think these cases are different, and a lot of people disagree with me. I, you know, Addy Roberts and our policy editor are just like having like a daily crash out about our feelings about tech policy and tech regulation because it feels like we've come to a point where everyone understands that the platform internet designed for virality and likes and reach and engagement has
has done some bad things and there isn't some market force to fix it. You can't start a new social network and be like, it's just like Instagram but it's not as engaging. Like, it's not going to work for you, right? Like, we've seen these attempts, like the market isn't correcting the harm. So you got to do something else. It is unclear what that something else is. And I think these cases are, well, we're not going to talk about the content on the platform. We're not going to run head first into the First Amendment and Section 230. We're going to say when you design the ranking algorithm for the Instagram feed and you put stuff that is more negative at the top, or you feed engagement by pushing notifications over and over again to young people in particular, you know what you're doing.
Those are choices you are making that you should be liable for. A really bad analogy, you can argue with this analogy a million different ways, is if I shipped you a print magazine and like the edges of the paper constantly gave you paper cuts, you would not be like suing me over the speech in the magazine. You'd be like, "This product hurts me." Right? And it's like kind of that dynamic in these cases. Now, I think a lot of people, Mike Masnick was just on Codebreaker. I think Mike Masnick is really smart. He's a great tech policy reporter. He runs Techdirt. He is like, this is a disaster for 230 and the First Amendment, right? Like people are having different reactions to these cases. My view is if you don't put some control, if you don't find some way to make these companies liable for the harm that most people feel that they have caused, then they're just going to keep getting away with it. And I think saying your products cause harm versus the content that other people distribute cause harm at least lets you get to is your algorithm any good, right? Can you push these many notifications to young people? Do your teen controls actually work? Do your parental controls actually work? I think there's some back and forth in there, but man, I again, the idea that you can go to court and say we're not liable for our product design because it contains the speech of other people, it just, to me, it has never passed the smell test. And I think we're going to see a lot of these cases come up and these companies are going to back into a posture where they have to fix the products and not necessarily the moderation. Yeah, I'm not sure how that's going to play out, but that feels like the future of these platforms.
Yeah, it was really fascinating. I went back and was reading a bunch about this case from 2021, Lemon versus Snap, which I either missed entirely at the time or had just kind of memory-holed, like it was 2021. There's a lot going on in 2021, but that to me is such a fascinating and sort of clean example here where basically like Lemon versus Snap was a kid was driving and there was a filter on Snapchat that would show how fast you were going and there was a belief that if you could take a picture while the filter showed you going over 100 miles an hour, you would get some kind of achievement inside of Snapchat. They did it. I believe it was 113 was what it showed on the filter when they took the picture and then they crashed and died. And initially this case gets thrown out on Section 230 grounds of like, well, this is just content on our platform. You can't hold Snap responsible for it. And then it turns around and an appeals court says, actually no, you can be tried for this because this is not, like you said, this is not about the content on the platform. This is about the structural design of the platform that incentivizes this kind of behavior. And actually, Snap can be held liable for that. And as far as I understand, that was the sort of crack in the door that a lot of people in cases like this saw as like, oh, this is now a road we can go down and a case we can win. And like the lines here are so unclear to me, which is what's really challenging, right? Where like we've spent a lot of time talking about algorithm speech and I don't have a clean answer to that in my head honestly. Like is the order in which you present a bunch of things to me protected free speech or not and should it be messy? So far pretty protected, so far keeps getting thrown out on 230 grounds, seems messy. But like in this case it's worth mentioning that the plaintiff here, KGM, didn't just sue Meta, she sued Meta and YouTube and TikTok and Snap and settled ahead of the trial with Snap and TikTok. But this is not a particular fight with a particular mechanism of Instagram. This is pointed at the entirety of the way that social media works, which I think is really fascinating. And like YouTube had a very funny statement at the end of this, which is, this is from Jose Castaneda from Google who said this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. Wrong. Flatly incorrect. It's just not true. Like nothing about YouTube is not social media. But there is this thing that can I stick on that for one second.
That is the nothing is anything argument of market definition that all these companies fall back into. You want to sue Meta for monopolizing social media. Like what is social media? Sure. Is Facebook social media? What is the market for Instagram? Is it videos of dancing people or is it how-to videos for small business owners? Nothing exists. And so I mean like they do this all the time. Yeah.
And so you know Google's saying YouTube is a streaming platform, not a social media site. It's like is there even a difference? This is what everyone's watching. Is TikTok a streaming platform and not a social media site? Like is Instagram, like you can't just fall back on nothing is anything all the time.
Right. Well and simultaneously nothing is anything and everything is everything. Yeah, like you can't. It just doesn't, none of that works. I think they all thought they were going to win because they win so much and I again I think the tech industry really misunderstands how much people dislike them.
So, okay. So, this is actually the thing I want to talk most about here is I think you can argue the facts of the case however you want. Right? The idea of is this an assault on free speech or is this a useful different way of talking about what these platforms are, I think is a good and valuable discussion, right? Like is your notification system different from my free speech? I would say I tend to be on your side of that, that passes a smell test for me of like the way that you make autoplay happen is different from the content of the video that I'm watching. And it was really interesting like there was a moment where the jury in this LA trial was instructed not to think about the content of videos. Like it was made very clear that this is not about the stuff that this person is watching, which is just fascinating in a case like this that is fundamentally about like what she watched and experienced on social media. But it is so clear to the point of like this is about the way the thing works, not about what is on the thing. But then it is just true that everybody hates social media. Like and so part of me wonders like it goes back to the fact that this is a jury trial. It goes back to the fact that there are like dozens or hundreds of these waiting in the wings. There's going to be more of them tried this year. Like did these tech companies just completely miss the fact that everyone turned on them?
I mean look there's like two ways you can express your opinions in America. You can vote with your dollars and you can vote with your votes. Voting with your votes, shaky track record, especially in terms of regulating tech companies. Like we're not good at. There's no privacy law in America. That is just a straight-up disaster. Everyone thinks we should have one. The tech companies have lobbied their way out of it over and over and over again. App store regulation, like the states are like, "We should do app store regulation. We should get rid of these Apple taxes." And Apple shows up with like 10 billion dollars and an army of lawyers and they go away. Voting with your votes is just not a thing we're doing well when it comes to regulating tech companies. Okay, we should vote with your dollars. I actually think that would be the preferred outcome, right? Like you compete in the market and people choose the one that makes them feel good. These companies are all so big and they all own, they don't really compete head-to-head, right? There's not a competitor to YouTube that's run by Apple, right? Apple actually tried to build an AI product and they just end up using Google's model. Yeah. Right? Like there's something about this where they've all retreated to their boxes and they have little like skirmishes, but they don't actually compete. Which is why I find the nothing is anything argument always so hollow. It's like if you go to a normal person, is YouTube different than Instagram? They're like, "Yes, it is." And then the lawyers get in the way and they define everything down to nothing is anything. And now no one competes with anybody, right? But they're not actually competitive. And so the idea that people dislike them is not showing up in any numbers. No one's switching away. No one's stopping to use Instagram because they're mad at Mark Zuckerberg. They just keep using it because it is a monopoly in its way. We last week we talked about how there's not a great consumer AI product. And I mean you probably heard it as much as I did, but ChatGPT is the most popular consumer product in history. You know what it was before that? Was the Xbox Kinect, like whatever. Sure. People have feelings about the product, right? AI use is off the charts. It's because it's everywhere in front of everybody all the time. It doesn't mean what you think it means because there's no market competition where people are like, I'm done with this one. I'm going to buy another one now. Right? Car makers know about market competition. Right? You're like, "Your car is old and you're going to go buy a new car and maybe you'll stick with the brand you have or maybe you'll buy a different car and the products are replaceable in that way." It's just not true for these companies. And so I think they look at their data and they're like, "Gemini usage in search is off the charts. People must love it." And you're like, "Uh, do they?" Right? Instagram looks at usage and they're like, "Man, there's more video being uploaded to Instagram Reels every day. People must love it." And it's like, "Do they?" And I think they've missed it. I think they have missed that real people are having real experiences on their platforms. And when you hurt a bunch of kids, the parents are going to get mad. And if you hurt enough kids, even if it is statistically not a huge number, you're still going to get a bunch of mad parents who've had similar experiences saying, "Why aren't you responsible?" And they will find a way. You know, the first case you're talking about that tried this theory was like 2016, 2017. It was Heric versus Grindr.
Oh, yeah. Where a young man sued Grindr because his ex-boyfriend had made like 100 fake profiles and relentlessly harassed him and the courts found that 230 protected Grindr because it was the speech that was a problem, not the product design. That was shot one, right? People have just been trying this theory out and finding the edges and the boundaries of, okay, you're not responsible for the content, we'll give you that. You're not responsible for the content. You are making the systems that enable the content to hurt people. You need to be responsible for that. And again, you get a bunch of parents, they're going to be relentless with this idea. Like it, I mean, you and I are both parents, like they won't stop, right? Even and we hear this from these companies over and over again, if the harm is statistically small, right? You have five billion users, like we only hurt 2% of people. That's a lot of people. Yep. And they will be relentless. And I do think these companies have missed it in their own data that a lot of people are actually unhappy with the experiences they're having because there's no competition. So you can't switch, right? So again, I just come back to you. You can vote with your vote, you can vote with your dollars, maybe you can vote with your attention. And if none of those systems work, you end up in court and you end up with some outcomes that again I think that the 230 repercussions, the free speech repercussions will be big, right? These companies will start to moderate and build their systems in different ways. But what other choice do we have? Because I think nothing, I think status quo is not acceptable.
Right? So this is where I want to poke the middle ground for you between government free speech regulation is bad and these platforms need to be reined in. Right? Because this is the thing and I think the challenge we have gone through for a long time is that the only way to pick this fight has run directly into free speech and so it is very hard to a, litigate and b, like morally defend. But I do think like to your point, one of the things that has changed is that people are more and more aware of a, the bad time they're having on social media platforms and b, the lack of recourse they have both to sue the companies about it, but also like leave, right? Both for sort of addictive property reasons and also for where else are you going to go reasons, right? Like network lock-in is a huge important thing that like it's where people are. It becomes very hard to leave even if you desperately want to. And so all of this stuff is just like we're at a point now where I think one way to look at these things is to say, okay, this is going to give us an avenue to regulate notifications, which is like one possible outcome of it is like we're going to get to have a whole conversation about...
No, I actually disagree. I think right like the outcome of a court case in which you lose some money and right now they haven't lost that much money, right? $6 million. Yeah. Well it's 375 million for Meta in New Mexico. It's three million in total compensatory damages of which Meta has to pay 70% and Google has to pay the rest in California. It's $8. Like it's $8. There's going to be a punitive award in California. We don't know how much that's going to be, but then there'll be more cases and that will add up. But even the juries in these cases are saying that the punitive damages are not the point. The point is the precedent. Like everyone is crystal clear on the thing they're trying to do, right? They're opening the floodgates to more litigation. So that's not actually regulatory, right? They're not saying here's how you should design these systems. What they're saying is your approach to handling your own information. You did your own studies on how this stuff was affecting teenagers and you made these decisions anyway. You were negligent. That's bad. Yeah. There were all these things that came up in trial about the parallel paths of Meta studying the negative effects that its platforms had on people and also identifying teenagers as the main source of growth for its platforms. Like that stuff became very damning very quickly of like, oh, this is bad for teens. And then there was an email that I think was like growth: teens. What you're going to see is these companies are ideally going to make different decisions, which is just different than a regulatory approach. Sure. Right. Like Europe is like here's what the button should look like. Have you seen a cookie banner? It should say these words on it. Like there's one whole approach that's happening in other countries. The United States is different and for a lot of reasons we're different. And so we're saying you made bad decisions, you're punished. Hopefully that leads you to make different decisions. A thing Meta and Google could do is say we're actually never going to make different decisions. We'll just keep eating the losses in court. Yeah, we have a lot. If it cost me $3 million every time a kid gets hurt, that is an acceptable outcome. That seems like not what they should do. That seems morally abhorrent, but that's what I mean. Like it's not regulatory in that way. That's a thing you could just pay the fine every time. Sure. I don't think they're going to do that. I think actually what they're going to do is appeal. By the way, the Meta statement is very good because as you pointed out, they sued all the companies. So Meta says we respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. And it's like yeah they didn't. Yes, it's all of them. Yeah, I know what you're saying. And also we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and it's like your record's bad. And in fact, there was evidence that came out in this case that Meta in particular has done less work to track that evidence because it knew what was going to come up. Like do you remember all those years ago when Mark Zuckerberg said something to the effect of like the only reason you're mad at us is because we're the ones who do the research on what's actually going on. All this other bad stuff is happening elsewhere. And they just don't know because they choose not to. They just turn a blind eye to it. The lesson Meta learned from that was to turn its own blind eye apparently.
Right. So again, what are some actual regulations that don't run into free speech that might help? A privacy law, like straightforwardly here's how these companies can use our data to operate their services? That would be good. Algorithmic transparency laws where they have to publish how their algorithms work, laws making sure that they do their research and they publish the results of that research so there's not a negative incentive for the research to exist. Right? And none of this infringes on the free speech of these platforms. It just says you have to make the information and share it with us and then protect our information as you run your services. We are just not going to get there. No, those are not proposals like algorithmic transparency proposals come up every year. There are bills in Congress right now. What are we doing? We're not funding the airports. It's like there's just a roadblock to the voting with your dollars world that is causing everybody to try to find other avenues. And so courts are the last avenue and here we are. And I really do think these companies, I think they thought they were going to win. They have a record of winning. Yeah. And I think they did not understand how much public opinion has shifted against tech companies, particularly with social media platforms. We'll see. They're going to appeal. Anything can happen. The appeals process is very different. But you know, the judges are on social media, too. They also have feelings about all of this. Yep. So we'll see. Yeah, it is fascinating. Like, you know, they always talk about jury selection and they're trying to find people who are not biased against the defendant. It's like, boy, I don't know if you can find 12 people who are going to be unbiased against how bad social media has become. Look, I, you know, I'll flip this around. I have very complicated feelings right now about the state of tech regulation. I have very complicated feelings about Brendan Carr and the state of like speech regulation in America. Like I think government speech regulations are bad. Like just flatly I think they're bad. These companies have used the First Amendment as a shield against accountability for every single decision they have ever made. And at some point it just enters like ludicrous zone where everything is speech. Like anything that happens on a computer is speech and no one can ever be accountable for it. And there has to be some recalibration of that so that we're protecting things that are actual speech and making people accountable for the product decisions they make that affect people's lives. And somewhere in there is the right answer. I don't know what it is. I think these cases are going to make a lot of people recalibrate that answer. But I do think everything that happens on a computer is speech has just led us to these outcomes where these companies are more powerful than ever. They control more speech than ever without any market forces to shape them up. And then there's only going to be one other outcome. And that outcome is the government does stuff. And I think that is the worst possible outcome. So hopefully what you get out of this is a bunch of companies reacting to their own research, making different decisions, and actually competing to keep people safe. Yeah. All right. Well, there's more of these cases to come this year. Like you said, we're going to get appeals. It feels like this floodgate is now open. And what it leads to, I think kind of remains anybody's guess. So we'll see, but we'll stay on it. We should take a break and then we're going to come back talk about some stupid speech regulation. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. Long long ellipsis there. I'm just, can I hype up some sponsorship ideas that are coming, please? That's it. That's my whole... Love it. We're sponsored by our upcoming sponsorship ideas. We got to compete with Influencer World and we're not going to do it. We got to figure some stuff out. I'm just saying. I love it. Get ready. It's all going to get weird here on the Vergecast. I'm very excited about it. I don't even have to ask. I've been following the news. I know. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast and then a podcast with some new competition that I'm not even ready to talk about. America's favorite podcast than a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy this week with theme music by Chris Swickon.
I get real like what if there was a Nick Jr. show called Brendan Carr is a dummy vibes from... I got Postal Service. I can see that. Sure. A lot of, I feel like we have a lot of fans who grew up in the same era of music as we did. Yeah. I believe we're getting a lot of early 2000s indie on Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's good. I appreciate it. That was very good. All right, we're back. Nilay, what did he do this week?
What did Brendan Carr do this week?
Uh, well, first of all, you mentioned the other show. So it turns out our friend Kara Swisher has been calling Brendan Carr a dummy on her shows every single week. We have not communicated about this. She's doing it. So she said she's going to do an episode of On with Kara Swisher called "Brendan Carr is a Dummy," which is very funny. Independent thought, you know, convergent evolution.
Yeah. It's really—it's like when everybody invented the light bulb all at the same time. It's like we all just figured out Brendan Carr right at the same time.
