In your briefing today:

📣 Catastrophic floods caused by the collapse of a glacier have killed at least 160 people in Tibet, with more than 1,300 people missing. Dramatic pictures, widely circulated on social media, showed people running for their lives at the border crossing between Nepal and Tibet, as vast waves crashed over the buildings and washed away everything before them.

Rescuers are struggling to reach the devastated area, on the border between Tibet and Nepal, and the death toll is expected to climb sharply in the days ahead. (AP)

📣 Prime Minister Andy Burnham has called a summit of First Ministers - from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - saying he wanted “every leader in this country signed up” to having “good jobs in every community”. Downing Street said the First Ministers would meet the Prime Minister in October, at the National Economic Council. (BBC)

📣 Social media giant Meta - the company behind Facebook and Instagram - has agreed to a $18 billion settlement to resolve claims its products harm children. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

It had been taken to court by 48 US states, who had alleged the company knew about the problems its products were causing, had designed its products in ways that created addiction among children, and did not act quickly or strongly enough to address concerns.

The settlement has the potential to reshape the online environment: among the remedies agreed, Meta will only pay out 70% of the settlement unless other social media companies join it in tightening processes around age verification, and design changes intended to reduce harm.

Whistleblowers say the settlement still does not go far enough. (WSJ)

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📣 Women’s safety campaigners have called for better use of technology to monitor people who are a risk to their partners, following the murder of a woman in Renfrewshire. (STV)

📣 Scottish Water CEO Alex Plant has defended his six-figure bonus, saying financial incentives help “drive everybody’s focus”. (Times)

📣 Glasgow’s People’s Palace will be boosted by £14 million of Scottish Government money to plug a financial hole caused by rising renovation costs. The famous museum has been closed since 2024. (BBC)

📣 The number of people travelling through Scottish airports jumped sharply in the spring. (BBC)

📣 Andy Burnham “risks a trade war” with Donald Trump over sanctions on Israel, Labour MPs have warned the Prime Minister. (Times)

📣 Birmingham has been hit by “significant flooding” amid weather warnings across a swathe of England and Wales. (Mirror - live coverage)

📣 The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have returned to the UK to start a new life after six years in the US, arriving at Birmingham airport yesterday lunchtime. (Independent)

📣 Two German airport workers have died of malaria, potentially brought into the country by mosquitoes on an aircraft. (BBC)

⚽️ It was a good night in Vienna: Hearts put in a performance for the ages to overcome Rapid Vienna on penalties and qualify for the Conference League. (BBC)

⚽️ The fallout from Celtic’s embarrassing exit from the Champions League on Tuesday night continues - Mark Palmer says it’s the club’s worst result ever, and sums up an “analogue club in a digital age”. (Times)

⚽️ Hibs are hoping a packed Easter Road can roar their side on to victory in their play-off with Gent, but they have some injury concerns ahead of their biggest game since the 2016 Cup Final. (Edinburgh News)

⚽️ It looks like Rangers midfielder Nico Raskin will leave the club soon: he’s not in the squad for his side’s vital Conference League qualifier against Jablonec tonight. (Sun)

🗣️ Social media might just have had its “big tobacco moment”.

That’s the phrase film director-turned children’s safety campaigner Baroness Beeban Kidron, in Edinburgh earlier this month, uses to describe the moment of accountability for the likes of Meta and TikTok.

It dates from the 1990s, when a flurry of lawsuits against “big tobacco” pinned responsibility for their products on the makers, and led to bans on advertising and sponsorship that vastly reduced the number of young people starting to smoke.

Writing in her compelling book Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, Baroness Kidron set out her belief that social media companies put toxic products - their social media apps - into the hands of children for financial gain.

As she explained to The Nerve last month: “If these apps were an air fryer, they would have been recalled by now. If they were a gas boiler, they would have been recalled by now. They are dangerous, they are hurting kids, they are depressing kids, and they’re killing kids.”

The big moment of change in their - and our - world came yesterday, when Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement to resolve claims, advanced by most US states, that Facebook and Instagram harm children.

Meta has made the settlement without any admission of wrongdoing.

As the BBC’s Zeo Kleinman explains, on the face of it the case was about children’s privacy - about whether the company’s assiduous data gathering, and use of that data, on young people under the age of 13 breaks a decades-old law.

In truth, it was an attack on the firm’s online safety standards: about the content children end up seeing on their platforms, about the interactions they have which lead to harm, about safety tools that are inadequate for the job.

That all may be about to change, and the required alterations - to Meta’s products themselves - are being seen this morning as the significant part of Meta’s settlement. Far more significant even than that huge payout, which will be paid in instalments, may be deferred if other companies do not join it in improving online safety, and which amounts to only a small fraction of its £201 billion annual revenues.

"This is a major moment to clean up an industry that has been hurting our kids," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

The key change is the repeated use of one word in the settlement: “default”, which appears repeatedly in the 130-page document.

It means that, rather than demand users tell Meta’s systems they are a child, their products will require age verification to confirm the user is an adult. The onus switches from children and their parents to the software’s maker.

And, until that happens, by default a range of protections will be switched on: measures such as controls on how they interact and what content they see.

The New York Times sets out what is changing for teens on the platforms: time limits are switched on, autoplay on content is switched off. New protections against contact from strangers, and new ways to report harmful content.

That requirement to confirm age will infuriate libertarians and some internet old-timers, who have resisted any sort of ID-based control on digital experiences. There are also warnings that age verification systems don’t work very well.

But it’s inevitable they will arrive, likely more widely than only on Meta’s systems, and that need to verify age - and, potentially, identity as a consequence - will radically change the online experience, from an “anything goes” world populated by anonymous actors to one increasingly based on real identity, from a world designed to create addiction to “doomscrolling” and “likes” to ones with those features disabled - by default.

Do the new protections go far enough? Campaigners are already arguing they do not: they allow, for instance, the social media company to define “harm”.

Anyone who has read Kidron’s book, or Sarah Wynn-Williams’ brilliant Careless People (about her professional life inside Meta, and the company’s culture, which Meta is desperate you don’t read) would suggest the company is ill-equipped to make that judgement.

But it is a start on controlling these vast corporations: another crack in the platform-not-publisher constitutional shield they’ve used to avoid accountability throughout their existence.

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