2026-01-22
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I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series,
I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
What did they miss the first time?
The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Plus, a dispute between Elon Musk and Michael O'Leary,
the boss of Europe's largest airline, Ryanair, intensifies.
And Donald Trump has rode back somewhat on his threat to take Greenland by force.
Markets have reacted positively.
We're going to start today by talking about social media because Snap,
the company that owns Snapchat,
has agreed to settle a US lawsuit out of court with a teenage woman who accused it of impacting her mental health and leaving her addicted to the platform.
A trial will still go ahead anyway against Metta, Byte Danson Alphabet, who she also accuses,
in a case that could have big implications for social media giants and their responsibilities to their users.
Anna Alczek is a tech reporter for Business Insider.
So Snapchat just settled a pretty high profile lawsuit just days before it was supposed to go to trial in California.
And the case is part of a group of bellwether trials.
Basically a 19 year old woman who's known as KGM is claiming Snapchat and other social media apps like TikTok and YouTube meta design features and algorithms that encouraged addictive use and contributed to her mental health issues.
And it represents cases from thousands of similar claims.