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Comparing social media platforms to casinos and addictive drugs, lawyer Mark Lanier delivered opening statements Monday in a landmark trial in Los Angeles that seeks to hold Instagram owner Meta and Google’s YouTube responsible for harms to children who use their products.Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube face claims that their platforms addict children through deliberate design choices that keep kids glued to their screens. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums.Jurors got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining defendants.Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt spoke of the disagreement within the scientific community over social media addiction, with some researchers believing it doesn’t exist, or that addiction is not the most appropriate way to describe heavy social media use.Lawyers representing YouTube will begin their opening statement on Tuesday. ‘Addicting the brains of children’ Lanier, the plaintiff’s lawyer, delivered lively first remarks where he said the case will be as “easy as ABC” which stands for “addicting the brains of children.” He said Meta and Google, “two of the richest corporations in history,” have “engineered addiction in children’s brains.”He presented jurors with a slew of internal emails, documents and studies conducted by Meta and YouTube, as well as YouTube’s parent company, Google. He emphasized the findings of a study Meta conducted called “Project Myst” in which they surveyed 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use. The two major findings, Lanier said, were that Meta knew children who experienced “adverse events” like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact.He also highlighted internal Google documents that likened some company products to a casino, and internal communication between Meta employees in which one person said Instagram is “like a drug” and they are “basically pushers.”At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury. Plaintiff grew up using YouTube, Instagram KGM made a brief appearance after a break during Lanier’s statement and she will return to testify later in the trial. Lanier spent time describing KGM’s childhood, focusing particularly on what her personality was like before she began using social media. She started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, Lanier said. Before she graduated elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube.The outcome of the trial could have profound effects on the companies’ businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.Lanier said the companies’ lawyers will “try to blame the little girl and her parents for the trap they built,” referencing the plaintiff. She was a minor when she said she became addicted to social media, which she claims had a detrimental impact on her mental health.Lanier said that despite the public position of Meta and YouTube being that they work to protect children, their internal documents show an entirely different position, with explicit references to young children being listed as their target audiences.The attorney also drew comparisons between the social media companies and tobacco firms, citing internal communication between Meta employees who were concerned about the company’s lack of proactive action about the potential harm their platforms can have on children and teens.“For a teenager, social validation is survival,” Lanier said. The defendants “engineered a feature that caters to a minor’s craving for social validation,” he added, speaking about “like” buttons and similar features. Meta pushes back In his opening statement representing Meta, Schmidt said the core question in the case is whether the platforms were a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles. He spent much of his time going through the plaintiff’s health records, emphasizing that she had experienced many difficult circumstances in her childhood, including emotional abuse, body image issues and bullying.Schmidt presented a clip from a video deposition from one of KGM’s mental health providers, Dr. Thomas Suberman, who said social media was “not the through-line of what I recall being her main issues,” adding that her struggles seemed to largely stem from interpersonal conflicts and relationships. He painted a picture with KGM’s own text messages and testimony pointing to a volatile home life of a particularly troubled relationship with her mother.Schmidt acknowledged that many mental health professionals do believe social media addiction can exist, but said three of KGM’s providers all of whom believe in the form of addiction have never diagnosed her with it, or treated her for it.Schmidt emphasized to the jurors that the case is not about whether social media is a good thing or whether teens spend too much time on their phones or whether the jurors like or dislike Meta, but whether social media was a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles. A reckoning for social media and youth harms A slew of trials beginning this year seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being. Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the Los Angeles trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in health care costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.A separate trial in New Mexico, meanwhile, also kicked off with opening statements on Monday. In that trial, Meta is accused of failing to protect young users from sexual exploitation, following an undercover online investigation. Attorney General Raśl Torrez in late 2023 sued Meta and Zuckerberg, who was later dropped from the suit.A federal bellwether trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.Ortutay reported from Oakland, California. Associated Press Writer Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this story. Kaitlyn Huamani and Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writers
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Shares in Spotify Technology SA (NYSE: SPOT), the worlds largest music streamer, are surging this morning. As of this writing, the Swedish companys stock price is up 18% to above $489 per share after the company reported blowout fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings. Heres what you need to know. Spotifys Q4 2025 surpasses expectations On Tuesday, Spotify reported its Q4 2025 earnings, which outpaced investor expectations. Here are the music streamers most salient metrics for the quarter, which ended on December 31: Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 751 million (up 11% year over year) Premium Subscribers: 290 million (up 10% year over year) Total Revenue: 4.531 billion (up 10% year over year on a constant currency basis) Diluted earnings per share (EPS): 4.43 Whats significant about these numbers is that they not only beat most analyst expectations, but Spotifys own expectations as well. As CNBC notes, LSEG analysts expected Spotify to report an EPS of 2.74. The company easily beat that by 1.69 per share. Spotify was expected to report 4.52 billion in revenue; the company beat slightly with 4.531 in revenue. Analysts also expected Spotify to report around 745 million MAUs. The company beat that by 6 million users. Spotify itself originally forecast 745 million MAUs for the quarter and 289 million premium subscribers, both of which it beat. Spotify Wrapped contributed to premium subscribers beat Premium subscribers are among Spotify’s most valuable, because of the recurring monthly revenue they generate and their loyalty to the brand. And this time, the premium subscriber growth for Q4, which rose 10% year over year, can be partly attributed to the companys wildly popular year-end Wrapped roundup. Speaking on the companys financial call after Spotifys results were announced, co-CEO Alex Norstrom revealed that the companys most recent Wrapped, which went live in December 2025, was also the most successful, calling Wrapped 2025 record-breaking. While we saw impressive engagement back in 2024, we also got feedback on the user experience. So this year, we turned up the dial, and the response was redeeming, Norstrom said, according to a PitchBook transcript of the call. At the end of the campaign, more than 300 million users engaged, which was up 20%, and we saw more than 630 million shares across social media, which is up 42%. He added that “day one of Wrapped marked the highest single day of premium subscriber intake in Spotify history. Given Wrappeds 2025 success, its a safe bet the company will double down on it when the next iteration launches this December. The SPOT stock surge isnt enough to erase its recent decline Despite Spotifys stock price surging in early morning trading today, the impressive gains arent enough to get SPOT out of the broader slump its been in lately. SPOT stock currently sits at around $489 a share after gaining 18% this morning. However, even with todays gains, SPOT shares are still down more than 17% year to date. Spotifys stock price fell dramatically in early February amid a broader tech selloff. Over the past year, SPOT shares also remain in the red, down nearly 25%. At around $489 per share, SPOT shares are currently well below their peak of $785 in June of last year. Looking forward, Spotify says it expects to add another 8 million monthly active users during its current Q1 2026. Likewise, it expects to add another 3 million premium subscribers during the same period. The company expects total revenue for the quarter to be 4.5 billion.
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As Big Tech races to weave AI into nearly every product, Mozilla is betting some users want the opposite: the ability to turn it off. Last week, the company announced new controls to allow users of its Firefox browser to decide when to use AI. When Firefox 148 debuts later this month, users will be able to manage or disable individual AI features like translations, tab grouping and a sidebar for chatbot like Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Le Chat Mistral. Much of Mozillas vision around AI was outlined in its annual State of Mozilla report, which was released last month and calls for a new Star Wars-style rebel alliance composed of developers, cybersecurity experts, investors, and others focused on responsible tech. The plan involves doing for AI what Mozilla once did in the earlier days of the web. The goal is to bend history in a different direction with the resources and the community we have, says Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman. In a recent interview with Fast Company about the strategy, Surman likened the winner-takes-all mindset of some AI giants and startups to the galactic empire’s ambition to have an expanding footprint. “The Empire, like any empire, is more diffuse and more spread out than you think it is, Surman says. Transforming things is a constant battle of trying to do stuff that’s for humanity, against the things that are threatening us and holding us back. Funding the rebellion With more than 200 million users, Firefox is now Mozillas most popular product. However, Mozillas portfolio also includes other aspects like an email platform, a VPN, an AI data exchange, a venture arm and other initiatives for open-source AI. Mozilla also recently announced a new program inviting technologists to apply for a few months of paid work exploring early-stage ideas that could be worth Mozilla investing in. Part of Mozillas plan includes spending around $650 million this year, with 80% going to improve and maintain core products like Firefox and the rest directed toward what Surman calls systematic and aggressive investments in trustworthy AI and related areas. Mozilla also has $1.4 billion in reserves that it could use as dry powder for worthy bets on things like open-source AI developer tools and encrypted AI assistants. But thats not much compared with the hundreds of billions Mozillas rivals invest in AI-related capital expenditures each year. While Mozilla has leaned on Star Wars rebel alliance metaphor before, its vision has roots in an era that now feels a long time ago (and far, far away). In 1998, when Netscape created Mozilla.org, Microsoft was on trial for antitrust, as early open-source projects began challenging proprietary control of the web. Surman recalls it feeling impossible at the time to unseat a company that dominated browsers, servers, and operating systems. (A few years after AOL bought Netscape, Mozilla was spun off in 2003 as an independent nonprofit, followed in 2005 with the creation of Mozilla Corporation as a for-profit subsidiary.) [It took] a set of people who all wanted a different future they could configure and tweak and make their own, Surman says. It’s not like they all had to build one big thing. We built a browser. A bunch of people built Linux, a bunch of people built web servers, and people built thousands of other things. Decades later, its now Google thats on trial for antitrust while Mozilla competes against other privacy focused browsers like DuckDuckGo and Brave alongside AI startups like OpenAI and Perplexity that now have their own browsers. The antitrust scrutiny and growing distrust of AI and Big Tech have some finding a new hope for raising old questions about choice and competition. Mozilla also operates Gecko, one of only three major browser engines alongside Googles Chromium and Apples WebKit. That gives Mozilla a key role in shaping how open web standards are developed and implemented through groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium. It hasnt all been smooth sailing. Mozilla’s also had setbacks over the past year or two. In late 2024, it announced plans to lay off around 30% of its staff and last year it shuttered products like Pocket as part of a plan to refocus on offerings. Finding moonshots on Earth Mozillas new report is more like a manifesto designed by an underground collective inspired by punk and resistance movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The microsites design seems to intentionally reject the minimalist uniformity common with Big Tech brands and rebrands. Mozillas efforts also include a new Choose Your Future campaign for internet users, developers and advocates interested in charting a new path. The campaign is anchored by a series of five short videos thatll be featured on social media and through ads on platforms like Reddit, Meta, and X. The ads all have different messages, but the same ending sound: a modem dial-up as a nod to the internet from a few decades back. Each features a dystopian parable for an AI era without options but with plenty of AI slop and intrusive chatbots. One video starts with a girl staring at a toy called Funblock, which a radio ad markets as the only block you’ll ever need. No choices, no options, no confusion. Just endless identical fun, the narration says. Funblock may result in boredom, diminished agency, and loss of independent thought. Ask your algorithm if fun is right for you.” Mozillas new AI strategy exists in an uneasy tension of how to build trustworthy tech in an industry obsessed with growth. Can it offer a viable alternative to Big Techs tightly integrated ecosystems while still being the internets moral compass? Surman thinks so, adding that Mozillas having the same AI debates internally as the world is having outside it: what to do with AI, what not to do, when its useful, when its scary, and how to make tech that’s better for everyone. But instead of putting data centers on the moon, Mozilla hopes to forge a future thats privacy-enhanced, open-source, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. “[People say] ‘You’re crazy, that can’t happen, Surman says. But you think we’re crazier to do a collective barn-raising for something that is joyous and great, and you’re going to put data centers on the moon, and we’re the ones who aren’t grounded in reality?”
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