Brian Boland spent over a decade figuring out how to build a system that would make Meta money. He told a California jury on Thursday that he was fueling the draw of more users, including teenagers, to 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 connected over the alleged harm to a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg framed Meta’s mission as a balance between security and free speech, not revenue. Boland’s role was to counter that by explaining how Meta makes money and how that shaped the design of its platforms. Boland testified that Zuckerberg fostered a culture that prioritized growth and profit over the well-being of users from top to bottom. He said he was described as an informant — a term Meta sought to limit widely for fear it would prejudice the jury, but which the judge generally allowed. During his 11 years at Meta, Boland said he went from a “deep blind faith” in the company to a “firm belief that competition, power and growth are the things that matter most to Mark Zuckerberg.”
Boland most recently served as Meta’s vice president of partnerships before leaving in 2020, working to bring content to the platform that it could monetize, and previously worked in various advertising roles since 2009. He testified that Facebook’s infamous early tagline “move fast and break things” represented “a cultural ethos at the company.” He said the idea behind the motto was generally, “Don’t think about what could go wrong with the product, just put it out there and learn and see.” At the height of their intrinsic importance, employees sat at their desks to see a piece of paper that read, “What are you going to break today?” Boland said.
“Achieving growth and engagement were priorities”
Zuckerberg has consistently made his priorities for the company clear enough, according to Boland. He announced them at every meeting and left no shadow of a doubt as to what the company should focus on, whether it was making its products to be mobile or to stay ahead of the competition. When Zuckerberg realized that then-Facebook needed to get in shape to compete with rumored social network rival Google (which he didn’t name, but appeared to be referring 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 that there was never a lock-in around user security, and Zuckerberg reportedly instilled in engineers that “the priorities were to achieve growth and engagement.”
Meta has repeatedly denied that it seeks to maximize user engagement on its platforms over protecting their well-being. In recent weeks, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri have expressed that building platforms that users enjoy and feel good about is in their long-term interests, and that’s what drives their decisions.
Boland disputes this. “My experience has been that when there were opportunities to really try to understand what might be harming the products in the world, they weren’t a priority,” he testified. “They were problems rather than opportunities for correction.
When security issues came up in press releases or regulatory issues, Boland said, “The primary response was to figure out how to manage the press cycle, what the media was saying, as opposed to saying, ‘Let’s take a step back and really understand deeply.'” Although Boland said he told his advertising team that they should be the ones to discover the “broken parts” rather than those outside the company, he said the philosophy does not apply to the rest of the company.
On the stand the day before, Zuckerberg pointed to documents from around 2019 showing dissent among his employees over his decisions, saying they demonstrated a culture that encourages diversity of opinion. However, Boland testified that while this may have been the case earlier in his tenure, it later became “a very closed culture.”
“There is no moral algorithm, it’s not a thing… He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, I don’t care”
Since the jury can only consider decisions and products made by Meta itself, rather than content it hosted from users, lead plaintiff Mark Lanier also had Boland describe how Meta’s algorithm works and the decisions that led to its creation and testing. Algorithms have “immense amounts of power,” Boland said, and are “absolutely relentless” in pursuing their programmed goals—in many cases at Meta, it was said to be a commitment. “There’s no moral algorithm, that’s not a thing,” Boland said. “She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep, I don’t care.”
During his testimony Wednesday, Zuckerberg noted that Boland “developed some strong political views” toward the end of his time at the company. Lanier spent time making sure Boland was respected by his peers and showed a CNBC article about his departure, which quoted a glowing statement from his then boss and a link to an unnamed source who allegedly described Boland as someone of strong moral character.
Under cross-examination, Meta attorney Phyllis Jones clarified that Boland did not work on teams tasked with understanding youth safety in the company. Boland agreed that advertising business models are not inherently bad, and neither are algorithms. He also admitted that many of his concerns were about the content that users were posting, which is not relevant to the current case.
During his direct examination, Lanier asked if Boland had ever expressed his concerns directly to Zuckerberg. Boland said he told the CEO he had seen data showing “harmful results” from the company’s algorithms and suggested they investigate further. He recalled Zuckerberg responding with something along the lines of, “I hope there are still things you’re proud of.” Soon after, he said, he left.
Boland said he left more than $10 million worth of unvested Meta stock on the table when he left, though he admitted he made more over the years. He said it still “gets on his nerves” every time he talks about the company. “It’s an incredibly strong company,” he said.