Brian Boland spent more than a decade figuring out how to build a system that would make Meta money. On Thursday, he told a California jury it incentivized drawing more and more users, including teens, onto Facebook and Instagram — despite the risks.
Boland’s testimony came a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a case over whether Meta and YouTube are liable for allegedly harming a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg framed Meta’s mission as balancing safety with free expression, not revenue. Boland’s role was to counter this by explaining how Meta makes money, and how that shaped its platforms’ design. Boland testified that Zuckerberg fostered a culture that prioritized growth and profit over users’ wellbeing from the top down. He said he’s been described as a whistleblower — a term Meta has broadly sought to limit for fear it would prejudice the jury, but which the judge has generally allowed. Over his 11 years at Meta, Boland said he went from having “deep blind faith” in the company to coming to the “firm belief that competition and power and growth were the things that Mark Zuckerberg cared about most.”
Boland last served as Meta’s VP of partnerships before leaving in 2020, working to bring content to the platform that it could monetize, and previously worked in a variety of advertising roles beginning in 2009. He testified that Facebook’s infamous early slogan of “move fast and break things” represented “a cultural ethos at the company.” He said the idea behind the motto was generally, “don’t really think about what could go wrong with a product, but just get it out there and learn and see.” At the height of its prominence internally, employees would sit down at their desks to see a piece of paper that said, “what will you break today?” Boland testified.
“The priorities were on winning growth and engagement”
Zuckerberg consistently made his priorities for the company abundantly clear, according to Boland. He’d announce them in all hands meetings and leave no shadow of a doubt what the company should be focused on, whether it was building its products to be mobile-first, or getting ahead of the competition. When Zuckerberg realized that then-Facebook had to get into shape to compete with a rumored Google social network competitor (which he didn’t name, but seemed to refer to Google+), Boland recalled a digital countdown clock in the office that symbolized how much time they had left to achieve their goals during what the company called a “lockdown.” During his time at the company, Boland testified, there was never a lockdown around user safety, and Zuckerberg allegedly instilled in engineers that “the priorities were on winning growth and engagement.”
Meta has repeatedly denied that it tries to maximize users’ engagement on its platforms over safeguarding their wellbeing. In the past weeks, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified that building platforms that users enjoy and feel good on is in their long-term interest, and that’s what drives their decisions.
Boland disputes this. “My experience was that when there were opportunities to really try to understand what the products might be doing harmfully in the world, that those were not the priority,” he testified. “Those were more of a problem than an opportunity to fix.”
When safety issues came up through press reports or regulatory questions, Boland said, “the primary response was to figure out how to manage through the press cycle, to what the media was saying, as opposed to saying, ‘let’s take a step back and really deeply understand.” Though Boland said he told his advertising-focused team that they should be the ones to discover “broken parts,” rather than those outside the company, he said that philosophy didn’t extend to the rest of the company.
On the stand the day before, Zuckerberg pointed to documents around 2019 showing disagreement among his employees with his decisions, saying they demonstrated a culture that encourages a diversity of opinion. Boland, however, testified that while that might have been the case earlier in his tenure, it later became “a very closed down culture.”
“There’s not a moral algorithm, that’s not a thing … Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t care”
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