Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg walked en masse into a downtown Los Angeles courtroom along with all the lawyers, reporters and advocates who had come to witness his historic trial, but with one notable difference: He was standing with an entourage. Meta’s appeared to be wearing Ray-Ban smart glasses.. On his way to the courtroom, he walked through a crowd of parents whose children had died fighting the problems attributed to the design of social media platforms that META has created. He would often spend the next eight hours answering questions in his signature matter-of-fact (or less charitably, monotonous) cadence, denying that his platform was responsible for the losses.
Zuckerberg was questioned in the morning session by Mark Lanier, the lead litigator for plaintiff KGM, a 20-year-old woman who claims Meta and Google’s design features forced her to use apps compulsively and caused mental health problems, which the companies generally deny. Lanier’s charismatic style, drawing from his second vocation as a pastor, was in stark contrast to Zuckerberg’s responses on the witness stand, where he sought to be critical of how employees discussed and sometimes criticized various security decisions. At times, Zuckerberg pushed back against Lanier’s characterization of his testimony. “I’m not saying that at all,” he said at one point. According to NPR. Meanwhile, Judge Advised People in the courtroom should not wear Meta’s AI goggles, and that they could be held in contempt of court if they fail to delete any recordings. Parents whose children have died after experiencing harm attribute it to her platform.
During his time on the stand, Zuckerberg has been pressed on both his decisions at Meta and previous public statements. He was asked about the alleged discrepancy between earlier claims that he had tried to keep children under 13 off Facebook and Instagram. and documents Explaining the importance of bringing young users to the platform. It was also asked to address decisions it had made that would affect young users of its platform, such as its decision to abandon a permanent ban on AR filters that alter users’ faces in ways that mimic cosmetic surgery.
“You don’t really build social media apps unless you’re able to get people to express themselves.”
Zuckerberg’s response to a question about the AR filter helped clarify one of the strategies he pursued: arguing that Meta made careful decisions to balance free expression against potential harm. During the testimony, Zuckerberg addressed a discussion among Meta executives in 2019 about whether to lift the temporary ban on filters, which was sparked by Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. was asked about last week.. Zuckerberg testified that after reviewing research on the effects of filters on user well-being, he felt that the available evidence of their harm was not compelling enough to justify a trade-off to limit one form of speech on the platform. “At some level you don’t really build social media apps unless you’re able to get people to express themselves,” Zuckerberg said. “I think we need to be careful about when we say, ‘Hey there’s a restriction on what people can say or express.’ I think we need to have clear evidence that something will be bad.
Zuckerberg eventually decided to allow creators to create some filters, except for things like mimicking nip and tuck lines, but not to recommend them or make Instagram itself.
Lanier suggested that Meta prioritized improving users’ time spent on the platform, but – as it is For a long time In other settings — Zuckerberg insisted that Meta had deliberately shifted its internal messaging to focus on increasing the value of the product for consumers, even if it led to a short-term decrease in usage. While some documents show that employees considered how banning filters might discourage some users, Zuckerberg said that wasn’t a big factor in his decision because they weren’t very popular tools 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 thought about welfare issues who had some concern that there might be a problem, but they couldn’t show any data that would convince me that there was enough of a problem to limit people’s expression,” he said. Lanier showed her an email from another Meta executive who said she respected Zuckerberg’s call, but disagreed based on the risks and her personal experience with a daughter who experienced body dysmorphia. “There won’t be any hard data to prove causality for many years,” the executive said.
When Zuckerberg reiterated that he did not find the available research compelling enough to justify a broader ban, Lanier asked if Zuckerberg had a degree in a different profession. “I don’t have a college degree in anything,” Zuckerberg replied.
Zuckerberg’s full day of testimony ended part of the second week of a trial expected to last at least six. The judge will soon hear from former Meta employees, including those who disagreed with the company’s approach to protecting teenagers, and YouTube executives, who are also defendants 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 make their presence known to the CEO. “I think it’s very clear who the parents in the room are, and I hope that when he sees it in this courtroom, because we’re sitting there, he sees it and feels it, because the only way we’re really going to change that is if he’s compassionate,” said Amy Neville, whose son Alexander, 1, died of fentanyl poisoning at the age of 1. part of the KGM case). “When we can tap into his compassion, we can get the change we seek. And so hopefully we got a little bit of that today. It remains to be seen.”