Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles in much the same way as all the lawyers, reporters and advocates who had come to watch him testify in the landmark trial, but with one notable difference: He was accompanied by an entourage who appeared to be wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. To get into the courtroom, he walked past a crowd of parents whose children died after dealing with problems they attribute to the design of social media platforms, including those made by Meta. He spent the next eight hours often answering questions in his typical matter-of-fact (or less charitable, monotone) cadence while denying that his platform was responsible for the damages.
Zuckerberg was questioned by Mark Lanier, the lead attorney for the KGM plaintiff, during the morning session. She is a 20-year-old woman who claims that Meta and Google’s design elements encouraged her to compulsively use their apps and lead to mental health problems, which the companies generally deny. Lanier’s charismatic style, drawn from his other profession as a pastor, was in stark contrast to Zuckerberg’s responses on the witness stand, where he tried to bring nuance to how employees discussed — and sometimes criticized — various security decisions. At times, Zuckerberg pushed Lanier’s characterization of his testimony. “I’m not saying that at all,” he said at one point NPR. Meanwhile, the judge admonishes people in the courtroom not to wear Met’s AI glasses, and that they could be held in contempt of court if they fail to delete any recordings; parents whose children have died after suffering harm they attribute to his platform watched on.
During his time on the stand, Zuckerberg was under pressure for both his Meta decision and previous public statements. He was asked about alleged discrepancies between previous claims that he tried to keep children under 13 on Facebook and Instagram and documents describing the value of getting young users on the platforms. He has also been asked to address decisions he has made that would affect young users of his platform, such as his decision to waive a permanent ban on AR filters that alter users’ faces in a way that simulates cosmetic surgery.
“You don’t really build social media apps if you don’t care about people having a say”
Zuckerberg’s response to a question about the AR filter helped illustrate one of his main strategies: he argued that Meta had made careful decisions to balance freedom of expression with potential harm. During the testimony, Zuckerberg addressed a discussion among Meta executives in 2019 about whether to lift the temporary filter ban, which Instagram chief Adam Mosseri was asked about last week. Zuckerberg testified that after reviewing research on the effect of filters on user well-being, he believed that the available evidence of their harm was not compelling enough to justify a compromise to limit the form of speech on the platform. “At some level, you don’t really build social media apps if you don’t care about people being able to express themselves,” Zuckerberg said. “I think we have to be careful when we say, ‘Look, there’s a limit to what people can say or express.’ I think we need to have pretty clear evidence that it would be bad.”
Zuckerberg eventually decided to allow creators to make some filters, except for things like mimicking nip and tuck lines, but he didn’t recommend them or that Instagram create them itself.
Lanier suggested that Meta prioritized increasing users’ time spent on the platform over well-being, but — as it has long done in other environments — Zuckerberg insisted that Meta had deliberately shifted its internal messaging to focus on increasing the product’s value to users, even if it led to a short-term decline in usage. While some documents showed that employees considered how banning filters might turn off some users, Zuckerberg said that wasn’t a big factor in his decision because the tools weren’t very popular in the first place.
“I don’t have a college degree in anything”
Still, Zuckerberg acknowledged that not everyone on his team agreed with the decision. “You had a group of people who were thinking about welfare issues, who had some concern that there might be a problem, but they weren’t able to show any data that I found convincing that there was enough of a problem to make it worth restricting people’s expression,” he said. Lanier showed him an email from another Met executive who said he respected Zuckerberg’s challenge but disagreed with it based on the risks and his personal experience with a daughter who experienced body dysmorphia. “There won’t be hard data to prove causal harm for many years,” the executive said.
When Zuckerberg reiterated that he did not find the available research conclusive enough to justify a broader ban, Lanier asked if Zuckerberg had degrees in various professions. “I don’t have a college degree in anything,” Zuckerberg replied.
Zuckerberg’s day-long testimony concluded part of the second week of the trial, which is expected to last at least six. Jurors will soon hear from former Meta employees, including those who disagreed with the company’s approach to juvenile safety, and executives from YouTube, which is also a defendant in the case.
Parents watching from public seats told reporters they didn’t feel like they learned much from the testimony, but many said they still felt it was important to inform the CEO of their presence. “I think it’s pretty obvious who the parents are in the room, and I hope when he looks in that courtroom, because we’re sitting right there, that he sees it and feels it, because the only way we’re really going to get change from him is if he’s empathetic,” said Amy Neville, whose son Alexander died of fentanyl poisoning at age 14 (which allegedly facilitated the KGMnap case). “When we can tap into his empathy, we can bring about the change we’re looking for. So hopefully we may have achieved a little bit of that today. That remains to be seen.”