Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a jury for the first time in a landmark social media addiction trial at the Los Angeles County Superior Court on Feb. 18.

Kaley, a 20-year-old woman, alleges Instagram and Google’s YouTube were intentionally designed to be addictive — and that they hooked her from an elementary school age, causing anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia.

The outcome of her lawsuit could affect the hundreds of other cases by families who say their own children have been harmed or even died because of social media. Meta, for its part, denies the accusations and says it’s implemented numerous measures to safeguard young users.

At the core of the testimony were questions about what Meta knew about the potential risks to young people and whether it did enough to mitigate them. Zuckerberg argued he aims to build a product that has long-term appeal, not one that gets people hooked in the short-term and makes them feel bad about themselves.

The lawsuit alleges that Meta designed its platforms to keep users scrolling and juice profits, a key line of questioning on that day.

Kaley’s lawyer Mark Lanier showed a 2022 document of “milestones” for Instagram that projected average time spent on the platform would grow from 40 minutes in 2023 to 46 minutes in 2026.

Zuckerberg disputed that milestones are goals. “If we do good work, this is something we expect to see,” he said.

Users can alter photographs with Instagram’s beauty filters, mimicking plastic surgery or other alterations. Lanier argued the filters could harm teens’ perceptions of themselves, saying experts consulted by Meta reached that same conclusion.

The company decided to allow the filters, but not recommend them, in the name of free expression, Zuckerberg said. Denying users the tools would have been “paternalistic” he added.

Later, Lanier showed an email that he said was sent by a Meta employee to Zuckerberg. The employee, a mother of two teen girls, warned about the filters and said the pressure on teen girls is intense.

Instagram says it requires users to be at least 13 years old to create an account.

But an internal document from 2015 estimated over 4 million Instagram users were under 13, which it said represented “30% of all 10-12 year olds in the U.S.” Kaley began using Instagram at age 9, Lanier said previously.

Instagram didn’t begin asking new users to input a date of birth until December 2019; previously, it just asked users to confirm they were above the age of 13. Instagram in August 2021 started asking existing users to provide a birthdate if they hadn’t done so previously.

That means Kaley wasn’t asked for her age at all when she joined the platform.

Zuckerberg argued Meta and many other social media companies struggle to accurately confirm young users’ ages because teens often lack government-issued IDs or other forms of verification.

2月18日，Meta首席执行官马克·扎克伯格在洛杉矶高等法院首次出庭，就社交媒体“成瘾”指控作证。这起案件被认为具有里程碑意义。

20岁的原告卡莉指控Instagram和谷歌旗下的YouTube故意设计成瘾机制，导致她从小学起便沉迷其中，产生焦虑、抑郁和躯体变形障碍。

此案结果可能影响数百起类似诉讼，这些案件家属声称孩子因社交媒体受到伤害甚至死亡。Meta否认指控，称已采取措施保护年轻用户。

庭审核心问题是：Meta对年轻人面临的风险了解多少，是否采取足够措施降低风险。扎克伯格辩称，他的目标是打造长期吸引力产品，而非让用户短期上瘾。

原告指控Meta故意设计其平台让用户不断刷屏以获取利润。

卡莉的律师马克·拉尼尔展示了一份2022年Instagram“里程碑”文件，预测平台平均使用时长将从2023年的40分钟增长到2026年的46分钟。

扎克伯格反驳称，里程碑不等同于目标，而是工作成果的预期结果。

用户可以使用Instagram的美颜滤镜修改照片，模拟整容手术或其他改变。拉尼尔辩称，这些滤镜可能伤害青少年的自我认知，并称Meta咨询的专家也得出了相同结论。

扎克伯格表示公司基于言论自由允许滤镜存在，拒绝使用将是“家长式作风”。

随后，拉尼尔展示了一封据称是Meta员工发给扎克伯格的邮件。这位身为两个十几岁女孩母亲的员工就滤镜问题提出警告，称青少年女孩面临的压力已经很大。

Instagram规定用户必须年满13岁才能创建账户。但2015年的内部文件估计，超过400万用户年龄在13岁以下，占“美国10-12岁儿童的30%。”卡莉9岁就开始使用Instagram。

Instagram直到2019年12月才开始要求新用户输入出生日期，此前仅要求用户确认年满13岁。2021年8月平台开始要求现有用户补充信息。

这意味着卡莉加入平台时根本未被询问年龄。

扎克伯格辩称，Meta和许多其他社交媒体公司都难以准确确认年轻用户的年龄，因为青少年通常没有政府颁发的身份证或其他验证方式。

(Translated by DeepSeek)