Trying to educate the American Public About AI over text message.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

It's Friday, time for Marketplace TechBites, where we look at a few big stories happening in tech.

This week, the prediction markets platform call she announces new rules.

Plus, the Department of Labor introduces an AI literacy course.

But first, a jury in Los Angeles found this week that meta and YouTube were negligent in what's being called a landmark case.

The social media companies were accused of designing their platforms to be addictive, which caused

harm to a young user's mental health. The companies will reportedly pay $6 million

in damages. Both companies have told media outlets they are disagreeing with the verdict

and are exploring their legal options. I talked about this with Maria Curie at Axios.

I think that this means that a lot of the parental controls at both of these companies

and that social media companies writ large claim to, you know, impose as a way to kind of

combat mental health harms and parental concerns are not enough.

And one of the main things that these trials showed the public was internal documents showing

how company executives, particularly at Meta, knew that their products could harm young

users and decided to roll out these features anyway. We're talking about

infinite scroll, auto play. And so this was kind of what led ultimately to this jury of 12 people.

You know, 10 out of the 12 people agreed that both of these companies were negligent and they did

knowingly harm these young users.

Yeah. And I understand this is one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts,

state attorneys against social media companies. How likely do you think we are to see actual

changes to the products these companies make? This is only the first bellwether case, and it could lead to thousands of more cases.

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