Mark Zuckerberg publicly lamented on Wednesday the time it took Instagram to limit the prohibited presence of users under 13, during his hearing before a jury in Los Angeles, while trying to convince that Meta was no longer seeking to maximize the time spent on its platforms.
During six hours of hearings at the trial of his group and Google, the CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) defended his company, sometimes ardently, at other times annoyed, during this sworn testimony, a first for him before a jury.
The two tech giants are accused by thousands of American families of having knowingly designed their respective platforms, Instagram and YouTube, to make them addictive for internet users from childhood, which they deny.
Instagram waited until 2019 to ask people who wanted to create an account for their date of birth, before extending this requirement to existing users in 2021, and then gradually verifying the veracity of these statements from 2022.
“We’ve added new (detection) tools over the years,” recalled the Facebook co-founder, the trial’s key witness. However, “I think we could have gotten to this point sooner,” he acknowledged.
– Screen time goal –
During the hearing, the plaintiff's lawyer, Mark Lanier, produced an internal document dating from 2018 which estimated, in 2015, the number of Instagram accounts belonging to children under 13 years of age at four million.
At the time, Instagram estimated that 301,000 10-12 year olds were on the network in the United States.
In this case, twelve jurors in a civil court must determine by the end of March whether YouTube and Instagram are partly responsible for the mental health problems experienced by Kaley GM, a 20-year-old Californian who has been heavily involved in social media use since childhood. She secretly managed to register on Instagram in 2015, at just 9 years old.
This first case and two other similar cases, also to be tried in Los Angeles by the summer, were chosen to test ways of resolving the thousands of complaints accusing social networks of being responsible for an epidemic of depression, anxiety, anorexia, and even suicides among young people.
The young woman's lawyer, who was in the front row opposite the multi-billionaire, also brought up the fact that in December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg himself had set a goal of increasing the average time spent on Instagram by 12% over three years.
“We had those goals,” Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged, “but after a while, I decided that our teams should no longer have time-spent goals (on Instagram), and we focused on usefulness and value.”
Pounded on this subject or on that of the cosmetic surgery filters which he eventually allowed on Instagram, the forty-year-old, initially imperturbable, began to show signs of annoyance, shaking his head and then giving increasingly animated answers, determined to defend the fact that he had evolved.
"If you create something that isn't good for people, they may spend more time on it in the short term, but they won't be happy with it," argued Mark Zuckerberg.
– “Side effect” –
Faced with an internal document from 2022 that still set "milestones" (reaching 40 minutes per day per user in 2023, up to 46 in 2026), the boss disputed that these were objectives, presenting them instead as indicators of user satisfaction.
In the afternoon, questioned by his own lawyer, a more relaxed Mark Zuckerberg, addressing the jury more often, asserted that the time spent on the application was a "side effect" of a quality experience.
He also touted the regulatory tools put in place to help parents and young people, prompting the opposing side to shove a 2023 Meta document in his face showing that only 1.11% of teenagers used the "daily time limit" feature and 21% used "take a break".
Meta's boss also used his interrogation to reiterate his belief that Apple and Google, which market the systems operating most smartphones, should organize age verification at the device level rather than leaving it to each application to handle.
Only the design of applications is affected by the debates because US law almost completely exempts platforms from liability for published content.
TikTok and Snapchat preferred to sign a confidential agreement with Kaley GM before the trial but remain concerned by the other complaints.
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