ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado was in the courtroom arguing on behalf of a coalition of states that Meta knowingly designed its platforms to be addictive to children while hiding the harms they cause. He joins us now. Attorney General Phil Weiser, welcome.
PHIL WEISER: It's great to be with you.
FLORIDO: The settlement includes both cash penalties and an agreement by Meta to place limits on how children - people under 18 - use their apps. Let's start with those limits. What are the most critical ones to your mind?
WEISER: The pain that I have felt hearing about kids and families were they weren't sleeping at night 'cause they got notifications and alerts all through the night. They were distracted the school day, spending an hour or more on their phones responding to social media when they should be focusing on school. That's going to change. Meta is now going to have quiet periods - no notifications, no alerts, no enticement to get on the platform - what are you missing during the school day? Or when kids need to be sleeping?
Now, there are a bunch of other limits that include caps on the total amount of time that include what are called productive pauses, encourage people to get off. But when you say to me, what is most important, I want our kids to get a good night's sleep. I want them focused in school. And social media has been a big problem on both of those fronts, and that's going to change.
FLORIDO: How do you enforce these limits? How do you force Meta, for example, to make sure that kids can't just, you know, pose as an adult to open an Instagram account that's not subject to these limits?
WEISER: One of the requirements of this decree is going to be age assurance that we're going to be able to prevent kids from pretending that they're of an appropriate age. So kids under 13, they're not allowed to join Instagram or be marketed to without parents consenting. And if kids are currently wanting to be on Instagram, it's been really easy 'cause you put in your actual birthday and they say, you can't join. So then people get the memo. They put in a different day and they join. There's been a lot of ways in which Instagram has been well aware this is happening and kids under 13 are on the platform.
That's going to stop. We're going to now put in effective age assurance and effective protections so that underage kids are not getting on the platform. And there's going to be an auditor who's going to oversee the conduct of the company. And we're going to hold them to account. We're going to make sure they follow these rules. This is going to be a game changer.
FLORIDO: Let's go to the money part of this settlement, $17 billion in penalties paid to the states over 10 years. Does Colorado have specific plans for that money?
WEISER: My general plan is this money has a very clear intended purpose, addressing a youth mental health crisis induced in considerable part by social media. So that's the focus. How do we help our kids? And I'm going to actually be talking to parents who've lost kids. I'm going to be talking to kids. And I'm going to be asking the question, how do we make sure these funds help address a crisis that has been top of my mind and top of my work?
FLORIDO: Attorney General, there was another landmark settlement back in the '90s, the 1998 tobacco settlement that was supposed to fund state antismoking programs. And states ended up using a lot of that money for things not related to smoking at all. How are you going to make sure that this Meta settlement money will actually benefit kids on this issue that you - that's very important to you?
WEISER: I'm not going to tolerate any misuse or misdirection of these funds. I'm in a unique position because I'm finishing my term as attorney general, getting ready to get elected, with voters supporting me, to be the next governor in Colorado, which means I'm going to have some oversight and abilities to be involved in this going forward. And what happened with tobacco is terrible because the money was not directed to its intended and really necessary use. We actually had a youth vaping crisis that came up because we had failed to keep our eyes on the ball. I'm going to keep my eyes on this ball. I'm going to make sure this money goes to where exactly it needs to go.
When I handled a similar situation with opioids, I had a similar moral commitment that the money that we got from deaths because of overdoses had to go to address the opioid crisis. I feel the same way here. This money has to go to address youth mental health. I will not tolerate it going elsewhere.
FLORIDO: Meta did release a statement today after the announcement of this settlement, saying that its success is going to depend on other social media platforms like YouTube, like TikTok, also reforming how they do business. Have you had any conversations that lead you to believe that these other companies are going to follow suit here?
WEISER: We are focused on this set of companies that you note. TikTok has very similar features that raise the same sorts of concerns. Snap and YouTube as well. And the need is for industry-wide relief. So there are cases that are mounting against TikTok, but the precedent we're setting here is one that we intend to follow and pursue across the industry.
FLORIDO: I've been speaking with Phil Weiser, attorney general of Colorado. Thank you.
WEISER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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