Grieving parents awaited Mark Zuckerberg’s arrival at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles for what is being called the social media industry’s “big tobacco moment”.
“I’m comforted by the fact he’s here alone, with only his lawyers and a jury. He’s without his lobbyists or his PR machine,” says Lori Schott, whose 18-year-old daughter Annalee had a social media addiction and died by suicide in 2020.
“If we would have been here in this court 10 years earlier she would have still been alive,” she adds.
Lori Schott from Colorado, one of the parents who say they lost their children because of social media. Pic: Reuters
‘They knew what they were doing’
Lori tells me how Annalee, who she describes as the central cog of their family, grew up on a farm in rural Colorado, but an interest in rodeos and horses was superseded by addiction to social media.
On TikTok and Instagram, she would use beauty filters, says Lori, and compare herself to other girls. Annalee’s anxiety and depression grew, and she even viewed a live suicide video online.
“They [the social media companies] knew what they were doing,” says Lori. “They did it for profit motives, and it’s got to stop. Our children deserve to take control of their own digital footprint.
“My daughter shouldn’t have had content pushed at her that said she was ugly, or her life had no future. This was an addiction by design, metrics were set on increasing usage. Some call it capitalism, I call it murder.”
Lori argues social media platforms are inherently addictive, and that the addictive nature of them has led to a host of personal harms.
That is also the allegation being made by the plaintiff in this case, a 20-year-old, referred to in court as “Kaley GM”.
She became an Instagram user aged nine and developed an addiction to many social media platforms. Kaley GM suffered from negative body image, anxiety and depression, her lawyers say.
TikTok and Snapchat have both reached settlements in the lawsuit, leaving Meta and Google as the remaining defendants.
Zuckerberg draws the crowds
Kaley GM’s is the first of nine separate trials in Los Angeles by nine different plaintiffs who claim that when they were minors they became addicted to social media and suffered varying harms.
Mr Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns and operates Facebook and Instagram was appearing in front of a jury for the first time, responding to the allegation that he put profit over the health and wellbeing of children.
He arrived at court flanked by bodyguards and sat nervously as he waited to take the stand. When he testified, the plaintiff KGM was sitting directly in his eye line, but he never looked at her. He nodded at the 12 jury members as they made their way to the box.
The interest in this case is so massive that the court held a “lottery” to determine who would “win” a seat in the public gallery to see Mr Zuckerberg. Raffle tickets were drawn and even some of the bereaved parents who travelled across the country to be here for this watershed trial were not allowed inside the room.
Zuckerberg in court – as it happened
Zuckerberg bristled at suggestions his platforms are designed to harm children. Pic: Reuters
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, focused on Instagram’s stated policy of not allowing under-13s on the platform.
Mr Lanier argued that not only did Instagram know there were users under 13, but the company aggressively sought to recruit them to the platform.
On three screens inside the courtroom he displayed an internal Meta memo from 2018.
“If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” it said. “We have definitively established tweens as the highest retention age group in the US.”
But Mr Zuckerberg bristled at the suggestion that Instagram is designed to be harmful to children.
“I’m focused on building a community that is sustainable,” he said. “If you do something that’s not good for people, maybe they’ll spend more time [on Instagram] short term, but if they’re not happy with it, they’re not going to use it over time. I’m not trying to maximise the amount of time people spend every month.”
He sparred with Mr Lanier, repeatedly accusing him of mischaracterising his testimony on the stand and previous statements he had made to Congress. There was no “gotcha” moment with Mr Zuckerberg and there is still plenty more testimony to come.
But if the plaintiff in this lawsuit is successful there may be thousands more similar cases waiting in the wings. It could drastically alter the way the social media industry operates.
