Sharon Keogan confronts Big Tech over Kayleigh verdict

Thank you and thank you for coming in this afternoon. So in March this year a young woman named Kayleigh won a landmark case in America and was awarded 6 million in damages after she sued Meta and YouTube over her child addiction to social media. A jury found that Meta and Google, the owners of YouTube, had intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed the woman's mental health. Both of your platforms have billions of users and there are hundreds of similar cases making their way through the courts. So what measures have you taken to prevent further litigation? And the same obviously would apply to Snapchat and TikTok. You were initially part of the defendants before reaching a settlement, so what measures have you taken to prevent further litigation? All of you can answer. Yeah, I can start. Yeah, so obviously you'll appreciate we can't speak in detail about any ongoing litigation. I think in that particular case you mentioned we have said that we will issue an appeal. But what I can say is YouTube has been at the forefront of building age-appropriate products and experiences for over a decade and we do that work in conjunction with expert advisors, including our youth advisory panel which Chloe referred to, includes child development experts, experts on mental health and other issues. And that has driven our product development to protect the well-being, particularly of young people. And in addition, we've worked to ensure that young people can safely enjoy the benefits that our products provide in terms of learning, education, exploration. So for that reason, we don't agree with the verdict and we intend to appeal to the court. We don't agree with the verdict and we intend to appeal. But just to answer your question specifically in terms of what measures we're continuing to introduce to address concerns in this area, we have been rolling out extensive well-being features, particularly on YouTube. These include age-appropriate experiences and products such as YouTube Kids, supervised experiences for older kids and younger teens, whereby parents can choose the degree of content, the type of content that's available to their young person and to other settings, including well-being features like take-a-break reminders to encourage young people to take a break if they're on the platform for very long, bedtime reminders to instill healthy bedtime habits. And Chloe already mentioned one of our newest product features, which is the timer for short-form content. So this, as Chloe said, is an industry-first. Parents can set for their kids a time that they're allowed to scroll through short-form content and they can set that down to zero if they wish, if they're concerned about that particular type of content. Galante. Thanks. And similarly, given that it's an ongoing case, I'm quite limited in what I can say, but I can say that we respectfully disagree with those verdicts and that we will appeal. We remain committed to building safe, supportive environments for young people and will defend our record vigorously. In terms of leaving the court case to one side, in terms of what we have done, we've built over 50 tools and I've put in a timeline of when those tools came out and what they do. Many of those have actually been subsumed into the teen accounts experience. So we believe that with the teen accounts experience and with the ongoing improvements that we're making, we're industry leading in terms of the safest environments for teens online. Okay, Susan. You can talk about it because you reached a settlement with the client. So we take each case on its merits, but we want to spend our time and focus our efforts on improving safety rather than in the courts. But I think it's important to note that TikTok introduced a 60 minute screen time limit many years ago, which parents can set the code to through parental controls. And we did that in collaboration with the Boston Digital Wellness Lab. So we worked with independent experts to help us determine the appropriate screen time limit. And Miss Cook. Thank you. Yeah, as with what Susan shared, so I think it's just to reiterate that Snap's use case is predominantly for that direct messaging between mutually accepted friendships. I think in terms of the addiction or addictive design feature conversation, Snap streaks are a feature on the platform and that's when you exchange the photos we call Snaps with a known contact and then you might have a number increase every day if you exchange photos and that number's private only to the users that are engaging in the streak. It's also voluntary and it's just aims to serve as a friendly reminder to keep in touch and to kind of strengthen these friendship bonds. In terms of addiction, it's worth reiterating that there's no nudge encouraging users to jump back into the app. We don't use push notifications to encourage people to keep up those streaks. So they are designed to kind of celebrate friendships in that way. I hope that kind of addresses the addiction. Thank you. I mean, last week we heard from young people and some of them were online six to eight hours a day. That's far too much time for young people to be online. So that is addictive whether you like it or not. Just in relation to Susan, in relation to TikTok, a study called Safer Scrolling conducted by teams at the University of Kent and University College London found that hateful and misogynistic material was being pushed on young people with boys suffering from anxiety and poor mental health being most at risk. Do you dispute the findings of this study? And if so, what measures have been taken to reduce misogynistic content on your platform? I think we can all agree that the misogyny has no place in society and it has no place on our platform. We do view things for a cross-sectional lens. We understand that women and girls, just by merit of who they are, face additional vulnerabilities and we want to limit that as much as possible. So in terms of what we do up front, our community guidelines are really clear. We do not allow misogyny on the platform. We do not allow the non-consensual intimate imagery sharing. We don't allow cyber flashing, hate speech, promotion of violence based on gender, and we're using moderation tools to find and remove that as soon as possible. So 98% of content that violates our community guidelines we're removing before people see it. That's still not enough. We want to go further on that. We're also empowering people by giving a range of tools. Now I appreciate that tools aren't always helpful on every occasion, because we want to have that complete baseline of no harm at all, but we do allow people the ability to make their accounts private, to restrict their content from selected users, and to have reporting tools.