Mark Zuckerberg spent more than five hours on the stand in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, testifying before a jury for the first time about claims that Meta deliberately designed Instagram to addict children.
The headline from most coverage was the spectacle: an annotated paper trail of internal emails, a 35-foot collage of the plaintiff’s Instagram posts unspooled across the courtroom, a CEO growing visibly agitated under cross-examination.
The more important story is what Wednesday’s proceedings are being used to build.
The trial is framed as a child safety case. What it is actually doing, especially through Zuckerberg’s own testimony, is laying the political and legal groundwork for mandatory identity verification across the internet.
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And Zuckerberg, rather than pushing back on that outcome, offered the court his preferred implementation plan.
The “Addiction” Framing and What It Enables
The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiff identified as KGM, now 20 years old, who claims she began using Instagram at age 9 and that the platform’s design addicted her to it, worsening her mental health, contributing to anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts.
TikTok and Snapchat settled before trial. Meta and Google’s YouTube remain defendants. Over 1,600 related cases are pending nationally. This is a big business. A verdict here could set the template for all of them.
The case rests on a contested scientific premise: that social media is clinically addictive and that this addiction causes measurable harm. That premise drives the legal strategy, the media coverage, and the resulting policy agenda. It deserves scrutiny that most coverage is not giving it.
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