Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify in social media trial – NBC Los Angeles

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to testify in a Los Angeles courtroom Wednesday as his and other social media companies are accused of designing their platforms to be addictive to children and young adults.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, and Google, which owns YouTube, are the core defendants in the Los Angeles Superior Court trial after a woman, identified only as K.G.M. alleged that social media use from an early age has led to addiction and caused depression and suicidal ideations.

The plaintiff has reached a settlement with Snapchat and TikTok.

Zuckerberg was likely to face tough questioning from K.G.M’s attorneys on whether Meta is doing enough to protect young users and whether it is targeting children to become hooked on social media to increase Meta’s profits.

The trial is being closely watched as a test case for hundreds of similar pending lawsuits. The cases all generally allege various damages from what attorneys call addictive social-media platforms powered by “complex algorithms designed to exploit human psychology.”

Some legal observers predict the trial’s outcome could have an influence on future social-media platform regulation and accountability.

Meta is strongly contesting all allegations in K.G.M.’s lawsuit and maintains it is committed to the well-being of its young users.

Last week, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, defended the platform in court, arguing that social media platforms are not intentionally engineered to be addictive.

“I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and problematic use,” he said when he was pressed about social media addiction.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, said in his opening statement on Feb. 9 that K.G.M. started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, and had posted nearly 300 videos before she even reached high school.

According to her suit, brought in July 2023,  K.G.M. began using social media at age 10. Her mother did not want her using it and tried using third-party software to prevent her daughter’s use, but the companies design
their products in a manner that allow children to avoid parental consent — and K.G.M. did just that, the suit stated.

Prompted by the addictive design of the Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok products, and the constant notifications that Meta, Snapchat and TikTok began pushing to her 24 hours daily, K.G.M. developed a nonstop compulsion to engage with the products, the suit alleged.

She did not know that each company made programming decisions aimed at targeting K.G.M., the suit states. For example, Meta and Snap’s AI user recommendation and connection tools facilitated and created connections between minor plaintiff K.G.M. and complete strangers, including predatory adults and others she did not know in real life and would not have met but for the seemingly random connections these companies made, the suit further stated.

Meta’s and TikTok’s product designs also targeted K.G.M. with harmfuland depressive content, urging K.G.M. to commit acts of self-harm, as well as harmful social comparison and body image, the suit stated.

“These are connections and content K.G.M. did not seek out or even want to see; instead, these are the types of harms defendants aimed at her in their efforts to prevent her from looking away at any cost,” the suit alleged.

At one point, K.G.M. suffered bullying and sextortion via Instagram, and she and her mother never could determine whether the abuser was someone who knew K.G.M. in real life or was a random stranger to whom Instagram connected her, the suit stated.

“In fact, it took K.G.M.’s friends and family spamming and asking other Instagram users to report the persons targeting minor K.G.M. for a two-week period before Meta did anything about the abuses, violation of terms and
illegal conduct of which it, by then, had full knowledge,” the complaint stated.

The more K.G.M. accessed the companies’ products, the worse her mental health became, the suit alleged.