Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has pushed back in court against a lawyer’s suggestion that he misled Congress about the design of the company’s social media platforms, as a landmark trial over youth social media addiction continues.
At a hearing in Los Angeles, California on Wednesday, local time, Mr Zuckerberg was questioned about his statements to Congress in 2024, when he said the company did not give its teams the goal of maximising time spent on its apps.
Mark Lanier, a lawyer for a woman who has accused Meta of harming her mental health when she was a child, showed jurors emails from 2014 and 2015 in which Mr Zuckerberg laid out aims to increase time spent on the app by double-digit percentage points.
Mr Zuckerberg said that while Meta previously had goals related to the amount of time users spent on the app, it had since changed its approach.
“If you are trying to say my testimony was not accurate, I strongly disagree with that,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s goals around the amount of time users spend on its apps have changed. (AP: Ryan Sun)
The appearance was the billionaire Facebook founder’s first time testifying in court on Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young users.
While Mr Zuckerberg has previously testified on the subject before Congress, the stakes are higher at the jury trial.
Meta may have to pay damages if it loses the case, and the verdict could erode the tech company’s longstanding legal defence against claims of user harm.
The lawsuit and others like it are part of a global backlash against social media platforms over children’s mental health.
Australia has prohibited access to social media platforms for users under age 16, and other countries, including Spain, are considering similar curbs.
In the US, Florida has prohibited companies from allowing users under the age of 14. Tech industry trade groups are challenging the law in court.
The case involves a California woman who started using Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube as a child.
She alleges the companies sought to profit by hooking kids on their services despite knowing social media could harm their mental health.
She also alleges the apps fuelled her depression and suicidal thoughts, and is seeking to hold the companies liable.
Meta and Google have denied the allegations and pointed to their work to add features that keep users safe.
Meta has often pointed to a National Academies of Sciences finding that research does not show social media changes kids’ mental health.
The lawsuit serves as a test case for similar claims in a larger group of cases against Meta, Alphabet’s Google, Snap and TikTok.
Families, school districts and states have filed thousands of lawsuits in the US accusing the companies of fuelling a youth mental health crisis.
Over the years, investigative reporting has unearthed internal Meta documents showing the company was aware of potential harm.
Adam Mosseri (left) testified last week in a landmark social media case trying to hold tech companies responsible for harm towards children. (AP: Damian Dovarganes)
Meta researchers found that teens who reported that Instagram regularly made them feel bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, Reuters reported in October.
Instagram chief executive Adam Mosseri testified last week that he was unaware of a recent Meta study showing no link between parental supervision and teenagers’ attentiveness to their own social media use.
Teenagers with difficult life circumstances more often said they used Instagram habitually or unintentionally, according to the document shown at trial.
Meta’s lawyer told jurors at the trial that the woman’s health records showed her issues stemmed from a troubled childhood and that social media was a creative outlet for her.
Reuters
