Mark Zuckerberg walked somewhat stiffly into a courtroom of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County at 9 am on the dot on Wednesday, having first been escorted into the building by a security detail that included two Department of Homeland Security officers. The venue, overseen by judge Carolyn Kuhl, was bursting with spectators and media, many crammed elbow-to-elbow on benches, all there to witness the Meta CEO testify before a jury about allegations that his company’s products pose serious risks to younger users.
Specifically, Zuckerberg was on hand to answer questions as to whether Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram were intentionally engineered to be addictive—as well as allegations that the tech giant had deliberately targeted tweens and teens with engagement-boosting strategies that led to mental health crises. It was to be a crucial showdown in a lawsuit brought by a now 20-year-old Californian identified as K.G.M. (although her counsel usually referred to her by her first name, Kaley) and her mother against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok back in 2023. They allege that her compulsive use of those platforms accounts at an extremely young age caused severe psychological damage.
After Meta and Google failed to get the case dismissed in November, Snap and TikTok settled out of court, leaving the other companies to face the first of nearly two dozen so-called bellwether trials about social media addiction currently on the docket in Los Angeles. These are the cases selected as representative of a much larger pool of litigants—some 1,600 in total—who have filed suits against the same brands on similar grounds, alleging that their children fell victim to depression, dysmorphia, and suicide after they got hooked on apps that absorbed their attention. The families of some of these children were among those vying for a chance to finally see Zuckerberg in the hot seat on Wednesday.
K.G.M.’s counsel, Mark Lanier, launched into his examination of Zuckerberg by putting the 41-year-old executive’s credibility under the microscope. Lanier picked apart claims Zuckerberg had made under oath in January 2024 during Congressional testimony about online child safety. While Zuckerberg had claimed that children under 13 are not allowed on Instagram, Lanier showed that in 2015 the platform internally estimated that there were then 4 million Instagram users under age 13, comprising 30 percent of 10-to-12-year-olds in the US. While Zuckerberg previously claimed that the Meta team does not receive directives to increase the time users spend on their platforms, Lanier produced a 2015 goal-setting email from Zuckerberg that listed this as the first item.
Elsewhere, Lanier sought to establish Zuckerberg’s ultimate decision-making authority over Meta, and quoted a remark he made in an interview with Joe Rogan last year: “Because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me,” he’d told the podcast host. Zuckerberg insisted in court that this was merely a “simplified” version of the truth.
Over the course of his testimony, Zuckerberg was oddly evasive about even insignificant details and basic definitions. He was not quite prepared to confirm that his relevant Congressional testimony had taken place on January 31, 2024, for example, and was hesitant to agree with Lanier’s proposition that when something is “addictive,” people “do it more” He ultimately hedged: “Maybe in the near term.” Zuckerberg also preferred to acknowledge any past comment, in probabilistic fashion, by saying “It sounds like something I would have said.” Likewise, when asked whether internal documents appeared to suggest Meta’s interest in maximizing “total teen time spent” on their apps, he often replied, “That’s what the document says.”