Mark Zuckerberg to testify in social media addiction trial

By Clare Duffy, Samantha Delouya, Veronica Miracle, CNN

New York (CNN) — Mark Zuckerberg is set to take the stand Wednesday to testify for the first time before a jury about claims that his social media platforms harmed children and teens.

Zuckerberg’s witness testimony in a landmark social media addiction trial will give the Meta chief executive a chance to defend the efforts the company says it has taken to protect young users.

Parents who say their children were harmed or died as a result of social media traveled from around the country to attend. They say the hearing marks a crucial moment of accountability for Meta following years of concerns about youth safety on its platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Nearly a dozen parents gathered and joined hands outside the Los Angeles Superior Court around 7 am Wednesday local time, and media flanked the courthouse entrance as they awaited Zuckerberg’s arrival.

Meta, as well as YouTube, are accused of intentionally designing addictive features that hooked a now-20-year-old woman as a child and harmed her mental health. The lawsuit brought by the young woman, identified by her lawyer as “Kaley,” and her mother is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits to go to trial.

Kaley began using YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at 9, according to her lawyer, Mark Lanier. She sometimes used Instagram for “several hours a day,” he said, and was once on the platform for more than 16 hours in a single day, despite her mother’s attempts to curb her use. Kaley claims the app’s addictive features led her to develop anxiety, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts and that she experienced bullying and sextortion on Instagram.

A Meta spokesperson has said “we strongly disagree” with the allegations in Kaley’s lawsuit and “are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” The company’s lawyer has argued that it was Kaley’s difficult family life, rather than social media, that caused her mental health challenges. YouTube also denies the lawsuit’s claims.

“The question for the jury in Los Angeles is whether Instagram was a substantial factor in the plaintiff’s mental health struggles,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony. “The evidence will show she faced many significant, difficult challenges well before she ever used social media.”

Meta has pointed to safety features, such as parental oversight tools and “teen accounts,” which implement default privacy settings and content restrictions for users under the age of 18.

Zuckerberg is expected to face questions about what Meta has known about the risks of its platforms for young users, and whether those safety features were sufficient to mitigate them.

“I’m sure he’s going to talk about the fact that he has children and this is really important to him… I think he’s going to just talk about everything that they’re doing to make it seem like ‘we’re doing the best we can,’” Kimberly Pallen, a partner at the law firm Withers who specializes in complex civil litigation, told CNN. “That’s probably what it’s going to come down to: From the jury’s perspective, are they doing enough? And do they care?”

Zuckerberg’s performance on the stand could also play a significant role in how the jury views the case, Pallen said.

“It’s going to turn on how these people testify in front of the jury, if the jury likes them, and what the documents show,” she said.

Zuckerberg is also likely to be asked — as Instagram chief Adam Mosseri was during his own testimony last week — whether he prioritized earning profits over youth safety with his product decisions, as Kaley alleges.

“Internal documents show that Meta understood the dangers its platforms posed to young people,” Kaley’s lawyer, Matthew Bergman, said in a statement Tuesday. “Yet Zuckerberg and Meta pushed forward, choosing features designed to keep kids online longer, even when those choices put children directly in harm’s way. For parents who have spent years fighting to be heard, this moment carries profound weight.”

The-CNN-Wire
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