Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the witness stand Wednesday at a landmark social media addiction trial in Los Angeles and flatly denied he sets company-wide marching orders to juice “time spent” on Meta’s platforms or lure kids under 13 as users.
Under blistering examination from plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier, who called him as an adverse witness, the Meta chief looked visibly irritated at times, arching his eyebrows and shifting in his chair as he was confronted with a string of internal emails and slide decks. Lanier repeatedly cut him off, citing time limits, as the exchange grew tense.
One such moment centered on an internal company email Zuckerberg sent in December 2015, where he wrote, “What I hope we can accomplish in 2016.” Zuckerberg said he hoped to increase “time spent” by users on company products by 12 percent over a three-year arc. Lanier asked if Zuckerberg could see a copy of the email in a binder in front of him. “Did you write that goal?” Lanier pressed.
“I believe I wrote this email, if that’s what you’re asking,” Zuckerberg replied. “And, like I said, we used to have goals around this, and at some point, I decided to change that.” He insisted he later scrapped “time spent” targets in favor of “milestones” tied to delivering “value” to users. And he suggested the email was more brainstorm than mandate.
“I’m not sure if these were official goals or anything,” he said. “I wrote my thoughts on what I was hoping to see.” Lanier wasn’t buying it.
“Sir, you are the decision maker for your whole company,” he shot back. “If there’s an email entitled ‘company goals,’ and you say you want time spent to increase 12 percent in three years and 10 percent in five years, don’t you think people will interpret that as company goals?”
“I don’t know how it got distilled into company goals,” Zuckerberg responded, maintaining he no longer runs Meta that way.
In another line of questioning, he stressed that Instagram’s terms have always banned 13-year-old users, and “when you sign up, you have to agree to the terms.” Lanier asked if Zuckerberg really expected a nine-year-old to read the “fine print” and obey it. The lawyer also showed jurors an internal document revealing how, in 2018, the company estimated that four million Meta users were younger than 13, representing around 30% of all kids 10 to 12 years old in the U.S.
“I don’t see why this is so complicated,” Zuckerberg replied, marking his first-ever live testimony about child safety in front of a jury. “It’s been our clear policy that people under 13 are not allowed on our services. [We’ve] been pretty consistent.” He said the company takes “proactive steps” to identify and remove these users, but, “we’re not perfect.”
‘I’m well-known to be very bad at this’
Over several hours on the stand, the 41-year-old tech titan leaned into his famously awkward persona. Asked whether he’d undergone extensive media training, he cracked, “I’ve done media over time, but I’m sort of well-known to be very bad at this,” drawing light laughter from the gallery.
When questioned about his staggering fortune, estimated at more than $200 billion, Zuckerberg volunteered, “It might be worth adding that I pledged to give almost all my money to charity.” He also testified that “a reasonable company” would aim to help users, not harm them, to keep its business healthy over the longterm.
The state-court trial, now in its second week, centers on claims that Instagram and YouTube functioned as “digital casinos” using addictive features to hook kids and keep them scrolling despite known dangers.
The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury. She claims platform design features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and alerts left her hopelessly hooked on Instagram and YouTube, causing her to suffer anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials.
Meta and YouTube are the two remaining defendants after TikTok and Snap agreed to private settlements over her specific claims. K.G.M. was in the courtroom for the first two hours of Zuckerberg’s testimony but left after that.
Asked about so-called cosmetic filters that allow users to alter features such as noses and lips, Zuckerberg testified Wednesday that Meta had, at one point, imposed a temporary ban on all filters before restoring many of them, provided they did not explicitly promote plastic surgery.
When confronted with evidence that 18 mental health experts had warned the company that such filters could harm teenage girls, Zuckerberg said the experts had not presented “any data I found compelling.”
Pressed on an internal message in which he expressed concern about “being paternalistic” in banning the filters, Zuckerberg said he didn’t want to be “overbearing” in dictating how people express themselves. Lanier said he wasn’t asking about a 12-year-old girl’s freedom of expression, rather why the concerns of 18 experts allegedly carried less weight.
“I feel like you’re mischaracterizing what I’m saying quite a bit,” Zuckerberg replied.
At one point, Lanier and his team unfurled a 35-foot banner showing thousands of photographs, many of them filtered selfies, that K.G.M. had posted to Instagram beginning at age nine. Zuckerberg said he had reviewed some of the images before testifying, though not “every single one.”
Under questioning from Meta’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, Zuckerberg cited a report by the National Academy of Sciences that reviewed more than 800 studies and concluded that social media did not cause changes in adolescent mental health “at the population level.” He said Meta’s temporary ban demonstrated that the company had taken the concerns seriously. He described maintaining a high bar of “demonstrated harm” before restricting expression. “I generally want to err on the side of giving people the ability to express themselves,” he testified.
On redirect, Lanier referred to an April 2020 email from Meta’s vice president of product design, Margaret Gould Stewart, who wrote directly to Zuckerberg to oppose restoring many of the filters. “As a parent of two teenage girls … I can tell you the pressure on them and their peers coming through social media is intense with respect to body image,” she wrote. “There won’t be hard data to prove causal harm for many years, if ever.”
Asked about the email, Zuckerberg said similar filters had long been available on other platforms and that, “if there had been harm,” experts would have been able to substantiate their claims with evidence. He said he had examined the issue “quite intensely” and that it had been “clearly something debated a lot internally, with equities on all sides.” In the end, he said, he believed he had struck a balanced approach by not recommending cosmetic filters and by declining to create in-house filters that promoted plastic surgery.
‘Problematic use’ or ‘clinical addiction’?
Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in 2004. The company acquired Instagram in 2012 for approximately $1 billion, and was rebranded as Meta Platforms in 2021. Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified as the second witness in the high-profile trial. Mosseri told jurors he believes there’s “such a thing as using a social media platform more than you feel good about,” but he considers such behavior “problematic use,” not a “clinical addiction.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke offered a contrasting view when she was called as the first witness at the closely watched trial. The medical director of Stanford University’s addiction medicine program and author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation told jurors she believes social media carries the risk of clinical addiction due to “potent” features such as autoplay, notifications, and “endless scroll that never ends, with no bottom to it.” She said the risk is highest for kids because their brains aren’t fully developed and lack impulse control.
“Instagram and YouTube provide 24/7, effectively limitless, frictionless access to their products, with ineffective age verification and ineffective parental controls,” Lembke told jurors. “It’s clear parents, by and large, are not using them because they’re difficult to navigate, and kids can get around them.”
At least a dozen bereaved parents who say their kids became addicted to social media before they died from suicide, drug overdoses, or accidental asphyxiation vied for seats in the courtoom amid fierce competition and a public lottery. When a court staff member called the ticket number for Tammy Rodriguez, the group cheered in a hallway. Rodriguez was among the first parents to sue back in 2022. Her 11-year-old daughter Selena died by suicide on July 21, 2021, after allegedly becoming so addicted to social media, she would run away from home or turn violent when her devices were confiscated or lost power, Rodriguez says. “We busted the courtroom doors open. It’s not whether we win or lose, because we’re always losing children … it’s to hold them accountable, just to make them sit there and have to tell their dirty secrets,” she previously told Rolling Stone.
Fellow plaintiff parents Brandy Roberts and Joann Bogard also snagged seats and joined Rodriguez in the back row of the courtroom to watch Zuckerberg’s testimony.
The role of technology in teens’ lives has loomed large at the trial. Lawyers for Meta and YouTube argued in opening statements that the apps help kids combat loneliness, pursue creative expression, and access educational resources. Meanwhile, a recent survey of American kids aged 13 to 17 from Pew Research found that 48 percent of teens say social media sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32 percent in 2022.
Alarmingly, suicide rates among young people aged 10 to 24 rose sharply between 2007 and 2021, spiking 62 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Before that, the suicide rate for young people remained stable between 2001 and 2007. Health experts, including Lembke and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, say teens are especially susceptible to social pressures, peer opinions, and peer comparison. Risk-taking behaviors also reach their peak during adolescence, they say, and if teens already are susceptible to addiction, the risks are greater.
This is a developing story…
