iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What can the US ask of China when it comes to AI? Not much, until we turn our instincts about dominance around, as I told @billpress.bsky.social on his show. bit.ly/Click-2-Listen

bit.ly

Bill Press Pods

With tech journo Jacob Ward and Mother Jones' David Corn.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Meta tried to have today’s witness barred from testifying...and no wonder. Former safety researcher Arturo Bejar told the world today that Meta is built for adult revenue, not child well-being. Here’s what I heard in the courtroom, including this headline. www.theripcurrent.com/p/you-just-c...

theripcurrent.com

“You Just Cannot Trust Mark Zuckerberg with Kids”

Meta tried to have today’s witness barred from court...and no wonder. Former safety researcher Arturo Bejar told the world today that Meta is built for adult revenue, not child well-being.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I'm only just beginning to take Bluesky seriously. Here's who I recommend right out of the gate. (And if anyone on this list cares to recommend me, feel free!) go.bsky.app/Rq4fEdM

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

This was direct examination — Meta's lawyers haven't cross-examined him yet. That's tomorrow.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

His line near the end of the day: "Instagram changed from a product that you use to a product that uses you."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Underneath it all, per Bejar: "move fast and break things" posters were still on Meta's walls in 2019, same as 2008. Reels launched, in his telling, without safety seriously considered in its design.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

In October 2021, days after Zuckerberg publicly wrote that the assumpion "we prioritize profit over safety and well-being — that's just not true," Bejar emailed him directly with the internal data.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

He helped run a 200,000+ person internal survey, then asked Instagram head Adam Mosseri directly: what's the goal number? What percentage of 13–15 year olds should be getting unwanted sexual advances? Bullied? Shown violent content? What's the limit we want? He says Meta never set one.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

His analogy (a little hard to follow, but here it is): "Prevalence is kind of the lettuce provider saying we tested all of our lettuce and found three bacteria, and harm that's expressed by users is the number of people that get sick because they ate the lettuce."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Meta's public reports: bullying/harassment at 0.05–0.06% of content. Meta's own internal surveys of teens: 20–27% experienced it in the last 7 days alone. Self-harm content: Meta said <0.05% publicly, 8.4% internally. Violent content: "100 to 400 times" higher internally.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The core of his testimony is about one word: "prevalence" — Meta's public metric for how much harmful content exists on its platforms. Bejar: "It is not an accurate description of what prevalence is at all."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Why he came back to Meta in 2019: his own 14-year-old daughter started getting unsolicited sexual messages from strangers on Instagram — and there was no way for her to report it. She just blocked them and moved on.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Arturo Bejar — Meta's former Instagram wellbeing lead — spent this afternoon on the stand. This is sworn testimony, not an opening statement. Here's what he told the jury: 🧵

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Both sides have now made their opening pitch to an eight-person jury that's advisory only — Judge Gonzalez Rogers rules. Neither side has presented actual evidence yet.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Whatever the jury thinks about who these platforms are "intended" for, he says the evidence will show the majority of users on both platforms are adults.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Schmidt's framing of the states' actual burden: they have to prove Instagram and Facebook were marketed to kids under 13, or that Meta knew it had underage kids on the platforms and didn't do enough.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Worth remembering here, for anyone shocked at the idea that Meta isn’t required to do any of those things: for most of the history of the Internet, we haven’t had a definitive Federal online privacy or online safety law in this country.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

On age: Schmidt listed three things Meta did that the law didn't require. No requirement to ask users' age — Meta asked anyway. No requirement to investigate age — Meta did it anyway. No requirement that users provide age at signup — Meta required it anyway.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Result: they banned filters that explicitly pushed cosmetic surgery, not the category entirely. His point to the jury: reasonable or not, it was reviewed for 10 months, not waved through.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Schmidt's framing: Meta weighed real concerns on both sides — well-being, and people's ability to express themselves.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Meta banned them to study the question, per Schmidt — a 10-month review, which he says is a far cry from how other companies would handle it. Findings: data on product impact was "negative," but research into well-being impact was "too new and not well-understood."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

On the filters story from this morning: Schmidt says it's more complicated. The filters were third-party products, posted to Instagram by outside developers — not something Meta built.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That’s Schmidt’s theme (and the crux of how he’s defended pharma clients and Meta in the past) — that scientific consensus hasn’t been reached, and thus claims of harm are impossible to lay at his clients’ feet definitively.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

He cited testimony from New Jersey's Department of Health leader, for instance, who reviewed the reports and was asked whether a causal relationship between social media and youth mental health harm has been established — and said no, she didn't believe it had been.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

On causation: Schmidt says Meta asked public health experts and officials directly.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Schmidt gave a note of caution to the jury: "Wait until you hear all the evidence." His framing: what they heard this morning was one side's opening, not proof of anything yet.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Schmidt ran this same role in the LA K.G.M. trial in February: questioned whether "social media addiction" is a valid diagnosis, cited the plaintiff's own mental health history, and played a provider's deposition saying social media wasn't "the through-line." Same approach again today.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Worth knowing who's talking: Paul Schmidt isn't a Meta or tech specialist. He's a mass-tort defense lawyer — wins defending McKesson in the opioid trials, Boehringer in Pradaxa, Eli Lilly in Cymbalta. Same playbook, new industry.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Here in Oakland, Meta's opening statement is underway — attorney Paul Schmidt is presenting the company's defense to the same jury that heard the state's case this morning. This thread covers only his argument (and I missed chunks of it for a CNN TV hit). Here's what he told them: 🧵

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Opening statements just started. This is the state's version of events — Meta gets its turn, and a jury (advisory only; the judge decides) hasn't weighed any of it yet. But if even half of this holds up under cross, it's a rough seven weeks ahead.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A damning line: an internal email from Meta's own global head of safety, Antigone Davis, to her own team: "We do very little to keep teens off our platform."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Why the backlog? The state argues Meta deprioritized enforcement specifically because it was worried about what it might find if it looked closer — a liability-avoidance choice.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Enforcement gaps, per the state: new accounts at one time defaulted to age 25. Linked accounts weren't deleted even after Meta removed the underage account they were tied to. A 2020 internal doc found a backlog of 700,000 under-13 reports Meta hadn't acted on.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

One example: Meta banned cosmetic-surgery-style filters (bigger eyes, fuller lips) over well-being concerns. Staff wanted the ban made permanent. Leadership reviewed the data — including the projected "negative growth impact" — and Zuckerberg let the filters back on.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Meta's "safety tools" will be on trial too. Daily Limit — a dismissible popup, not an actual limit — was meaningfully used by 0.05% of teens, per Meta's own data. "Take a Break" saw 0.2% adoption. The state's framing: too little, too late, and mostly for show.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

One internal employee message, surfaced in discovery: "Oh my gosh, y'all, Instagram is a drug…we're basically butchers."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Internal Meta communications tell a different story, O’Neill says. A memo: features "designed to play on insecurity, and increase time spent." Another: "Our product exploits weakness in human psychology."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Zuckerberg, asked directly if he believes his platforms harm children: "I don't believe so." Mosseri: "The effects on teen mental health seem to be quite small." Global safety head Antigone Davis: "I disagree that our product is addictive."

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A whistleblower is expected to testify that Meta's own researchers were forbidden from sharing internal findings, allegedly to preserve plausible deniability for executives.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

At the same time, Meta's public "Community Standards" numbers claimed: bullying/harassment 0.06%, violent/graphic content 0.02%, suicide/self-injury 0.05%. The state's argument: the public numbers never reflected what the private survey found.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Meta's own 2019 study: 1 in 5 teens said Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. A private 2021 survey of 13–15 year olds: 27% had witnessed something bad, 19% had seen nudity, 13% had been the target of unwanted sexual advances.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A 2016 internal doc set Meta's 2017 goal as: "Increase U.S. Teen Time Spent." A 2022 planning doc for 2023–2026 set the same Instagram target: "increase minutes spent" by daily active users. Not a side effect, per the state. The target.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The scale: Using Meta’s data, O’Neill says, an economist found that from 2012–2024, in just 4 states, kids under 13 opened 4.6M Instagram accounts and 9M Facebook accounts. There were 46 million separate instances when a kid spent 2+ hours on one of these apps.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Note that I've been covering this trial — and the past two that Meta lost — for CNN and at TheRipCurrent.com. Why didn't Meta settle? What's at risk for the company? What new facts about the company will we learn from the internal communications we see in evidence? Get it all as a subscriber.

theripcurrent.com

The Rip Current with Jacob Ward | Substack

Someone else is deciding how you work, what you buy, and who you become — and they didn’t ask you first. I’ve spent 20 years tracking tech power for NBC News, CNN, Al Jazeera, and PBS. Subscribe to se...

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Meta Trial: I'm in the Oakland courthouse for opening statements — CA Deputy AG Megan O'Neill is walking the jury through Meta's own internal numbers. This is the state's opening argument, not a verdict. (And we haven’t heard from Meta’s attorneys yet.) Here's what they say the evidence shows. 🧵

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Magnifica Humanitas is more technically literate than any AI law Congress has passed. The real test is whether accountability researchers and civil rights litigators use it the way labor organizers used Rerum Novarum in 1891. www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vatican…

theripcurrent.com

The Vatican's Indictment of AI

Magnifica Humanitas is more technically literate than any law Congress has passed. Whether it becomes the moral foundation of an AI New Deal depends entirely on who picks it up.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical names what Congress won't: algorithmic control over credit and employment, data colonialism, hidden labor, autonomous weapons with no accountability. The Vatican out-legislated the U.S. government. www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vatican…

theripcurrent.com

The Vatican's Indictment of AI

Magnifica Humanitas is more technically literate than any law Congress has passed. Whether it becomes the moral foundation of an AI New Deal depends entirely on who picks it up.

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Jacob Ward @byjacobward.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

The safety work got quietly dismantled in a reorg. The believer kept building. Sutskever's testimony in Musk v. Altman is a map of how an industry convinces itself the incentives and the mission are the same thing. TheRipCurrent.com

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