Zuckerberg testifies in social media addiction trial

The Meta boss has claimed that Instagram doesn’t hook kids, but internal documents suggest otherwise

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rejected allegations that his Instagram platform deliberately targets children and damages their mental health, in a trial that could open the floodgates to a wave of judgments against the social media giant.

Zuckerberg took the stand in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday. The plaintiff in the lawsuit, a 20-year-old California woman known as ‘Kaley’, alleges that she developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia after becoming addicted to Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms as a pre-teen.

Alphabet, which owns YouTube, is also named as a defendant in the case, while TikTok and Snap settled with Kaley out of court. Dozens of parents who blame these platforms for their children’s mental health problems or death by suicide attended the trial, and around 1,600 similar lawsuits are pending.

Zuckerberg denied deliberately designing Instagram to keep users scrolling, but was presented with internal documents revealing that Meta judged average time spent on the platform as a “milestone” for success. He also denied targeting preteen users in contravention of Instagram’s ban on under-13s. Again, he was shown internal documents that cast doubt on his defense.

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“If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” read a slide in a 2018 presentation. Another document from 2015 showed how an estimated 30% of 10-12-year-olds in the US were using Instagram, while another revealed that Meta aimed to increase the amount of screen time 10-year-olds spent on the platform.

Zuckerberg claimed that he did not “remember the context” of the latter document, and admitted that it is “very difficult” to prevent under-13s from lying about their age to set up accounts. Instagram only began requiring users to enter a date of birth in 2019. Previously, users were simply asked to confirm that they were over 13.

Meta’s lawyers argued that Instagram’s features – including ‘beauty’ filters mimicking the effects of plastic surgery – do not cause mental health issues by themselves. Kaley’s issues, they claimed, stem from her troubled childhood. In a statement released on Wednesday, a company spokesperson said that “the evidence will show she faced many significant, difficult challenges well before she ever used social media.”

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However, Meta’s own researchers found that teens who claimed Instagram made them feel bad about their bodies were shown more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, Reuters reported in October. Just under half of US teens feel that social media use has a “mostly negative” impact on their mental health, a Pew Research survey found last year.

The Meta lawsuit comes amid a wider push for regulation of social media companies in the West. Multiple European countries – including France, Greece, and Spain – have announced plans to ban social media use by children younger than 15 or 16. These bans have been bundled with legislation punishing platforms for “hate speech” and “disinformation,” a move that the US has fiercely condemned.