Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies in teen social media addiction suit
Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday as part of a landmark civil lawsuit accusing social media companies of building their platforms to get young users addicted to them, damaging their mental health.
The case, known as JCCP 5255, revolves around a 20-year-old woman known in legal filings as K.G.M. and her mother Karen, who allege that K.G.M.’s social media use, which began when she was 10, led to “dangerous dependency on [the social media companies’ products], anxiety, depression, self-harm, and body dysmorphia.”
They also allege that at one point, K.G.M. experienced bullying and sextortion on Instagram, claiming that the company didn’t do anything about the issue for two weeks until friends and family began repeatedly reporting the offending account.
The suit is a bellwether for thousands of other lawsuits filed by or on behalf of users, as well as school districts and states across the country that have made similar accusations against social media platforms.
During Wednesday’s hearing, a lawyer for the plaintiff asked Zuckerberg about a 2015 email appearing to call for increasing user engagement on Instagram. But the CEO claimed pushing for greater engagement isn’t one of the company’s objectives, according to CNBC.
The plaintiff’s lawyer also asked about the number of children under 13 who use Instagram, according to The Wall Street Journal. The lawyer, Mark Lanier, then produced an internal document from 2015 saying that an estimated 4 million users were under 13.
If Meta and Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) YouTube, which is also named in the suit, lose, they could face massive class-action suits. It also stands as a rather unique case in that, rather than going after the tech companies based on content itself, the case focuses on the design of their services and whether they were built to addict teens.
That’s an important distinction, because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields companies from being held liable for the content their users post online.
The current suit, which was initially filed in 2023, originally included Meta, Snap (SNAP), TikTok, and YouTube, but both Snap and TikTok have since settled for undisclosed amounts.
“We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify as part of a major social media lawsuit on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Nic Coury, File) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
“For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most. We use these insights to make meaningful changes — like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with tools to manage their teens’ experiences,” the company added.
Meta also claimed K.G.M. faced “many significant, difficult challenges well before she ever used social media.”
YouTube’s lead counsel, Luis Li, said in a statement following earlier testimony, “The facts we presented in court today make one thing clear: the Plaintiff is not addicted to YouTube and never has been. She, her father, and her doctor all swore to that. Medical records contain no such diagnoses, and the data proves she spent little more than a minute a day using the very features her lawyers claim are addictive.”
Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a separate statement that YouTube has been working in collaboration with youth, mental health, and parenting experts to build “services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
The crux of the lawsuit is whether social media platforms purposely design their services to keep teens coming back over and over again.
According to Erin S. Calipari, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research at Vanderbilt University, part of the issue is that users can absentmindedly find themselves picking up their phones and end up scrolling for hours.
“That’s, again, where these apps are engaging. They’re presenting information and patterns that we know bias towards habitual behaviors,” she said.
“They’re designed to create that kind of engagement. And it’s a kind of engagement you do start to see in … problematic disorders that disrupt people’s lives. And so I think that’s where having these conversations becomes critical,” Calipari added.
Plaintiffs attorney Mark Lanier arrives for a landmark trial over whether social media platforms deliberately addict and harm children, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ryan Sun) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Experts have been warning for years that social media use could lead to certain mental health issues. In 2023, the American Psychological Association issued an advisory stating that while social media isn’t inherently beneficial or harmful, teens shouldn’t use the technology in ways that could interfere with their sleep or physical activity.
In a 2024 opinion piece for the New York Times, then-US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said there should be a surgeon general’s warning label on social media sites stating that they are associated with “significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
According to Virginia Tech School of Communication professor Megan Duncan, the case could come down to who knew what and when: “Did Facebook, did Google, specifically design their products in a way that … boosted their bottom line with the knowledge that the way they were designing the product was going to cause harm to its users?”
Over the years, social media platforms have taken a number of steps they say are designed to give parents more control over what their teens see and help adolescents cut back on overall usage, including certain parental settings, teen accounts that limit who can message users, and more.
Regardless, winning in the current case will be important for Meta and Google, as a loss would make it far more difficult for them to fight similar cases in the future.
“If you lose on a factual claim that gets adjudicated that sort of says, ‘In this instance, you presented content that was going to be either addictive or manipulative of the various teen users,’ that’s a finding that can get used against you again and again and again,” Columbia Law School professor Eric Talley told Yahoo Finance.
Still, a win doesn’t necessarily guarantee Meta and Google are in the clear.
“It’s going to be very much to Meta’s benefit to fight hard in some of these early cases, because if they get some of those adverse rulings against them, they can be weaponized further,” Talley added.
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Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
