Meta CEO Zuckerberg pushed back hard today in court over claims that social media platforms like Instagram aim to hook and potentially harm users through calibrated algorithms and other engineering
Unlike rivals and one-tine fellow defendants TikTok and Snap, the Facebook founder showed no sign of even contemplating settling a potentially game changing mental health lawsuit against social media giants
In fact, in testimony Wednesday in downtown LA, the gold chain wearing exec was downright defiant to assertions that Instagram and other platforms are designed to be addicted and offer little protection to young and impressionable users. Though the often stiff and seemingly scripted Zuckerberg has spoken before Congressional hearings and in other venues on his businesses, his time on the stand today is the first occasion in which he was in front of a jury.
“I’m focused on building a community that is sustainable,” the billionaire Facebook founder asserted to a standing room only courtroom when pressed about the obsessive outcome of his social media platforms, their algorithms and auto-feeds. “If you do something that’s not good for people, maybe they’ll spend more time short term [on Instragam], but if they’re not happy with it, they’re not going to use it over time.,” the dark suited and sometimes wide-eyed Zuckerberg said to main plaintiff K.G.M.’s lawyer Mark Lanier. “I’m not trying to maximize the amount of time people spend every month.”
Now if that sounds like a contradiction to you coming from the man whose whole business model rests on people scrolling and other engagement, you are not the only one. Standing before the jury, Meta’s hefty legal team, LA Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl and others today, lawyer Lanier had a similar response. “Sir, you are the decision maker for your whole company,” the attorney burst out at one point in the courtroom full of parents and, for a while, K.G.M. herself, when Zuckerberg attempted to slither out of a December 2015 email he sent to staff about wanting to significantly increase “time spent” on Facebook and IG platforms.
Starting on social media at just 10-years-old, K.G.M. is alleging that the platforms, the dopamine releases they thrive on, and user specific tech took such a toll on her that over time she became deeply depressed and had suicidal tendencies.
Earlier Wednesday, before court started and Zuckerberg and entourage arrived, Meta swung the onus of K.G.M.’s supposed decline on K.G.M. herself. “The question for the jury in Los Angeles is whether Instagram was a substantial factor in the plaintiff’s mental health struggles,” the company said in a statement. “The evidence will show she faced many significant, difficult challenges well before she ever used social media.”
In that context, the case from the now 20-year-old Californian has the district possibility of stripping away some of the liability protections and content relief tech companies have enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Even if a jury agreed social media is engineered to be exploitive and targeted, especially to those barely in their teens, a verdict for plaintiff K.G.M. in this case or in the one running simultaneously in New Mexico, could just be the beginning of the beginning, so to speak. Like all such legal matter, it also has the possibility of being stuck in the pricey purgatory of appeals if Meta and Google come up short before said jury.
YouTube boss Neal Mohan was previously on the witness list to appear in court to answer questions from plaintiffs lawyers, but now that seems to no longer the case. No explanation has been provided as to why Mohan is now marked absent, at least for the time being.
Before TikTok and Snap signed confidential agreements with the plaintiffs and before this triall began on February 9, all the tech company defendants sought to have the case dismissed based on elements of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment. Judge Kuhl rejected those arguments in November of last year, stating the companies “were capable of causing the type of mental harms allegedly suffered.”
Called as an adverse witness, which allows the plaintiffs’ lawyers greater leeway in directing their questions, Zuckerberg certainly was adverse to giving any ground on the contention that Meta and other social media companies had much responsibility for the impact and dangers their product may have.
“You’re mischaracterizing this,” the 41-year-old exec snapped at Lanier after being quizzed on statements about child safety he made a while back on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Playing to his personal cliche of being “bad” at public speaking and events, Zuckerberg on several occasions Wednesday accused lawyers for K.G.M. of taking his words and correspondences out of context.
Perhaps not reading the courtroom, Zuckerberg also at one point debated Lanier on his notion of “goals” and “milestones” being very different things in terms of social media audience growth metrics and data. The tech kingpin also seemed to shrug off reports from within his own inner circle, according to documents produced in discovery, that warned a sizable section of users were under the age of 13. Admitting IG did bring in much of any age verification system until just a few years ago, Zuckerberg said the fact is some people simply “lie” about their age to get on the platforms and there was only so much Meta could do about it.
One thing, Judge Kuhl did do today, to show the tech crowd who is boss in her courtroom is, warned Zuckerberg aides and others wearing the Ray-ban Meta glasses that she would hold them “in contempt of the court” if any recording was done using the software. In what was not a good look for Meta, the Judge also demanded everyone wearing the costly specs take them off ASAP/
Ending his time grilling Zuckerberg, Lanier offered some drama of his own with the unfurling of a 50-foot scroll of dozens of pictures and selfies K.G.M. had posted of herself over the years using the much criticized IG beauty filters. Prodded by the lawyer on the display, Zuckerberg was silent.
After the day in court ended in LA, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez had his own opinion on what had occurred on the West Coast.
“In a California courtroom today, Mark Zuckerberg refused to admit what witnesses in our trial have repeatedly shown: Meta prioritizes profits over children’s safety,” Land of Enchantment AG Torrez told Deadline.. with a nod to the home state crowd and the larger world. “In the New Mexico Department of Justice’s trial against Meta, it has become clear that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have misled the public about the dangers of its products that its own researchers have known for years. Parents need to know about Meta’s pattern of deceit and the real dangers children face on these platforms.”