Zuckerberg Defends Meta in Landmark Trial

Mark Zuckerberg spent hours on the stand in a Los Angeles courtroom Wednesday insisting he never ordered Meta to keep users—especially kids—hooked on its apps, even as lawyers projected his own emails on a screen a few feet away. The Meta CEO was grilled in a landmark trial accusing Instagram and YouTube of being built like "digital casinos" to keep children compulsively scrolling, Rolling Stone reports.

• In one 2015 email titled "What I hope we can accomplish in 2016," Zuckerberg discussed boosting "time spent" on Meta platforms by 12% over three years. Pressed by plaintiff's attorney Mark Lanier on whether that amounted to a company directive, Zuckerberg said the message reflected "thoughts on what I was hoping to see," not formal orders, adding that Meta later dropped time-spent metrics for goals focused on "value" to users. "I don't know how it got distilled into company goals," he said. A 2017 email from an exec said, "Mark has decided the top priority for the company is teens," the BBC reports.

• Asked about internal complaints that Meta wasn't doing enough to stop people under 13 using Instagram, Zuckerberg said some people lie about their age when joining the platform, the Guardian reports. "You expect a nine-year-old to read all of the fine print? That's your basis for swearing under oath that children under 13 are not allowed?" Lanier asked.
• Lanier also asked Zuckerberg about media training, the AP reports. He pointed to an internal document that urged Zuckerberg to come across as "authentic, direct, human, insightful, and real" instead of "try hard, fake, robotic, corporate, or cheesy." Zuckerberg said it was only "feedback," adding that he is "well known to be sort of bad" at public speaking.

• The case was brought by a 20-year-old California woman identified as KGM, who says that she became dependent on social media as a minor and that Instagram and YouTube worsened anxiety, body-image issues, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. Lanier says she started using Instagram when she was 9.
• It's the first bellwether among more than a thousand suits claiming social platforms caused personal injury to young users. Earlier in the trial, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told jurors that some people "use a social media platform more than you feel good about," but called it "problematic use," not clinical addiction.

• Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, offered the opposite view, testifying that features like autoplay, notifications, and "endless scroll" can produce true addiction, especially in teenagers whose impulse control isn't fully developed. She criticized what she described as weak age checks and parental controls that kids can evade.