Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly lamented on Wednesday that Instagram had been slow to effectively identify users under the age of 13, who are theoretically banned from the social network, during his hearing before a civil court in Los Angeles.
The executive is testifying in the trial of Meta and Google, who are accused of knowingly designing their respective platforms Instagram and YouTube to make them addictive for young internet users, which they deny.
Instagram waited until 2019 to start asking people for their date of birth when they wanted to create an account, before extending this requirement to all users in 2021.
“We’ve added new (detection) tools over the years,” the Facebook co-founder noted. However, “I think we could have gotten to this point sooner.”
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.
The platform now uses identification tools that help it verify a person's age, particularly based on content and interactions.
Twelve jurors in a civil court must determine by the end of March whether YouTube (Google) and Instagram (Meta) are partly responsible for the mental health problems experienced by Kaley GM, a 20-year-old Californian who has had intensive use of social media since childhood.
Mark Lanier pointed out that the plaintiff had registered on Instagram in 2015, at only 9 years old, at a time when the social network did not control age.
This is the first time that the head of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) has spoken before a jury, under oath, about the security of his applications used by billions of human beings.
– Time spent –
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.
During the hearing, the plaintiff's lawyer also brought up the fact that in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg had set a goal, according to internal documents, of increasing the average time spent on Instagram by 12% over three years.
The methods used to get a young user to stay longer on a platform are at the heart of the trial, with Mark Lanier accusing Instagram and YouTube of having "manufactured addiction in children's brains".
“We had goals,” Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged, “but after a while, I decided that our teams should no longer have time-spent goals (on Instagram),” he explained, “and we focused on usefulness and value.”
Pounded with repeated questions about these famous objectives, the 40-year-old billionaire sometimes showed signs of annoyance, occasionally shaking his head.
"If you create something that isn't good for people," said Mark Zuckerberg, "they might spend more time on it in the short term, but they won't be happy with it."
“Internal documents show that Meta understood the dangers its platforms posed to young people,” but Mark Zuckerberg and his group “went ahead anyway,” denounced Matthew Bergman, founding lawyer of the Social Media Victims Law Center, before the hearing.
Meta strongly disputes these allegations and reiterates its long-standing commitment to implementing parental control and regulation tools.
Only the design of the applications, the algorithm and the personalization functions are concerned by the debates because US law almost totally exempts the platforms from liability for the content published.
TikTok and Snapchat, also targeted by these complaints, preferred to sign a confidential agreement with Kaley GM before the trial.
The proceedings underway in Los Angeles are taking place in parallel with a similar proceeding conducted this time on a national scale, before a federal judge in Oakland (California), and which could lead to another trial in 2026.
Meta is also on trial this month in New Mexico, where a prosecutor accuses the group of prioritizing profit over protecting minors from sexual predators.
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