Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company’s efforts to secure ever more of its users’ time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
Zuckerberg, wearing a navy-blue suit and tie, took the witness stand during the second week of arguments in the trial over the alleged harms suffered by users of social-media services, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
The questioning reflected criticisms that have long dogged the social-media giant, even as it has increasingly turned its attention to artificial intelligence and related technologies as its key drivers of growth. At one point during the morning, the judge told the courtroom that AI-equipped video-recording glasses and glasses with facial recognition technology were prohibited and that anyone who had taken such videos needed to delete them.
Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg about internal company communications discussing targets for how much time users spend with Meta’s products.Lanier showed an email from 2015 in which the CEO stated his goal for 2016 was to increase users’ time spent by 12%.
“We used to give teams goals on time spent and we don’t do that anymore because I don’t think that’s the best way to do it,” Zuckerberg said on the witness stand in sworn testimony.
Lanier also asked Zuckerberg about documents showing Meta employees were aware of children under 13 using Meta’s apps. Zuckerberg said the company’s policy was that children under 13 aren’t allowed on the platform and that they are removed when identified.
Lanier showed an internal Meta email from 2015 that estimated four million children under 13 were using Instagram. He estimated that figure would represent approximately 30% of all kids aged 10 to 12 in the U.S.
In response to a question about his ownership stake in Meta, which amounts to more than $200 billion, Zuckerberg said he has pledged to donate most of his money to charity.
“The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to invest in science research,” he said.
Meta and Google’s YouTube are facing the first of 3,000 lawsuits filed against them, alleging that the companies should be held liable for building algorithmic recommendations and product features such as the infinite scroll and autoplay that make it difficult for teens to log off.
The first case is a personal-injury lawsuit filed by a woman who goes by the initials K.G.M. in court documents. She alleges that social-media use as a child and teenager led her to struggle with body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, addiction and depression. Her complaint says she started using social-media apps when she was 10 years old.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said in a statement before the trial’s start that K.G.M.’s lawyers “will try to paint an intentionally misleading picture of Meta with cherry-picked quotes and snippets of conversations taken out of context. The full record will show a company that has consistently put teen safety ahead of growth for over a decade.”
On the stand, Zuckerberg was also asked about his decision to continue to allow beauty filters on the apps after 18 experts said they were harmful to teenage girls.
The company temporarily banned the filters on Instagram in 2019 and commissioned a panel of experts to review the feature. All 18 said they were damaging. Meta later lifted the ban but said it didn’t create any filters of its own or recommend the filters to users on Instagram after that.
“We shouldn’t create that content ourselves and we shouldn’t recommend it to people,” Zuckerberg said. But at the same time, he continued, “I think oftentimes telling people that they can’t express themselves like that is overbearing.”
He also argued that other experts had thought such bans were a suppression of free speech.
By focusing on the design of Meta’s apps rather than the content posted in them, the case seeks to get around longstanding legal doctrine that largely shields social-media companies from litigation.
At times, the case has veered into questions of content, prompting Meta’s lawyers to object.
Right before the end of Zuckerberg’s cross examination, Lanier’s team unspooled a 50-foot banner featuring all of K.G.M.’s Instagram posts since she joined the app 10 years ago. It took seven people to hold it up before the jury.
Then Zuckerberg was questioned by Paul Schmidt, a lawyer representing Meta.
Schmidt went back over many of the documents Lanier had presented and asked Zuckerberg about the company culture at Meta.
Zuckerberg said it is common for employees to disagree and there usually is at least one person who dissents from the majority.
“We make better decisions and build better things for people because we have all these different views,” he said.
Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive tasked with running Instagram, testified in the case last week. He said social media isn’t “clinically” addictive.
The trial is expected to last six weeks. Snapchat and TikTok were also originally defendants in the case but settled with the plaintiff shortly before the trial began. The details of the settlements weren’t disclosed, and both remain defendants in the other lawsuits.
A parallel social-media harm case is currently playing out in New Mexico state court, brought by the state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez. That lawsuit alleges that Meta designed its features and algorithms in a way that was dangerous to children and that it failed to protect them from sexual exploitation on their platforms.
A spokesman for Meta said the New Mexico attorney general, Torrez, was making “sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments by cherry picking selected documents” and that Meta is “focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
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