In A Landmark Trial, Zuckerberg Takes the Stand

0:04Meghan Bobrowsky:So it is 6.30 a.m. and it has just stopped raining. I am waiting outside a courthouse trying to get into this trial that is happening today.

0:20Ryan Knutson:Yesterday morning, our colleague Megan Bobrowski was in Los Angeles. She was there for a landmark trial and to watch testimony from a very high-profile witness.

0:31Meghan Bobrowsky:Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to testify, and Mark Zuckerberg is going to be defending himself and the actions of his company today in court.

0:45Ryan Knutson:The key questions hanging over Zuckerberg's testimony Is social media designed to be addictive? And is it harmful to teenagers? Last week, the plaintiff's attorney, Mark Lanier, spoke about the case on Fox Business.

1:02Mark Zuckerberg:We slapped a subpoena on Mark Zuckerberg on purpose because we've got documents with his name that he authored that we believe show he put profits over the safety of children.

1:14Ryan Knutson:— Lanier represents a 20-year-old woman who claims that she was harmed by social media use as a child.

1:20Mark Zuckerberg:— And we're going to put him on the stand and I'm going to grill him on it.

1:26Ryan Knutson:— Metta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said in a statement prior to the trial's start that the plaintiff's lawyers will, quote, try to paint an intentionally misleading picture of Metta with cherry-picked quotes and snippets of conversations taken out of context.

1:44Ryan Knutson:This trial, which is being heard by a jury, is the first of its kind, and the first of thousands of similar cases that are expected to go to court in the coming years. Here's Megan again.

1:56Meghan Bobrowsky:These cases are focused on how Meta designed its apps and whether Meta designed its apps to be addictive to people. That is a new argument that we're seeing. So the outcome could fundamentally change how the company operates. This could be a very big reckoning moment for big tech, and social media might not ever look the same after this is said and done.

2:24Ryan Knutson:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, February 19th.

2:37Ryan Knutson:coming up on the show social media on trial

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3:54Ryan Knutson:This lawsuit being tried in Los Angeles, and the thousands of cases like it, follow a similar script as the lawsuits that were brought against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

4:06Mark Zuckerberg:Disagreement forced on Big Tobacco dictates changes that three or four years ago all of us would have thought impossible. And it does it against a hostile, combative, and determined enemy.

4:19Ryan Knutson:In the 90s, tobacco companies were sued by state attorneys general over the health impacts of cigarettes, and they had to pay more than$200 billion in settlements.

4:30Mark Zuckerberg:We've arrived at our final destination, and that's the destination of tobacco justice. And now our people can breathe a lot easier. This time, indeed, the people have won.

4:45Ryan Knutson:Now, in the trial where Mark Zuckerberg testified, the plaintiffs hope social media companies will face a similar reckoning. But using social media, of course, is very different from smoking cigarettes. A lot of people, including tech companies, say social media is a great way to stay connected and share information. Still, there have been questions for years about whether social media can be addictive. And over the last two decades, some researchers say they found a correlation between social media adoption and an increase in mental health issues among young people.

5:19Mark Zuckerberg:A new study has found a link between preteens' use of social media and future depression. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

5:33Ryan Knutson:Up until now, lawsuits against social media companies have largely failed. thanks to a provision in a 1996 law known as Section 230.

5:43Meghan Bobrowsky:Section 230 is basically the stipulation at the federal level that says platforms cannot be held liable for the content on their platforms that's third-party content. And that has been proven in court time and time again that statute holds up.

6:05Ryan Knutson:Social media companies say that Section 230 is a bedrock principle holding up the entire internet. And that if it goes away, freedom of speech online would be threatened. Here's Mark Zuckerberg in 2020. Without 230, platforms could potentially be held liable for everything that people say. They'd face much greater pressure to take down more content to avoid legal risk. In the past, when Meta's been sued...

6:32Meghan Bobrowsky:Meadow will present a Section 230 argument, and the case will get dismissed. So that sort of protected them for a long time. It did not in this case.

6:44Ryan Knutson:That's because the cases playing out right now are trying a different strategy. Rather than suing over the content, they're suing over the way the platforms operate. They're arguing it's a product liability issue.

6:56Meghan Bobrowsky:— Now, what these new lawsuits take aim at is the way the apps are designed, which is Meta's responsibility, and you can sue them directly for.

7:08Ryan Knutson:— The plaintiffs allege that features like push notifications, endless scrolling, videos that autoplay, algorithms that are tailored to each user, are all designed to keep people hooked — and that teens in particular are especially vulnerable.

7:26Ryan Knutson:The idea for this approach gained traction in 2020, after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested publicly that Section 230 might not cover design choices. In the years that followed, thousands of product liability cases started being filed against social media platforms, including this one in L.A. In this case, the plaintiffs sued Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. Snap and TikTok settled shortly before the trial began, but are still defendants in many of the other cases. All right, let's talk about the case that's now being tried in Los Angeles. Can you tell me about the plaintiff?

8:02Meghan Bobrowsky:So the plaintiff is a woman who goes by the initials KGM. She is currently 20 years old. She was 17 years old when this lawsuit got filed. She lives in California, and the lawsuit talks about how she started using social media when she was just about 10 years old, which she's not supposed to do, but many people get around it.

8:27Ryan Knutson:KGM says her parents didn't know that she started using social media apps and that it was easy to get around the platform's safety features, which mostly prohibit kids under the age of 13 from using them. And as she did this,

8:41Meghan Bobrowsky:it coincided with a decline in her mental health. She would get push notifications all day to use these apps, and she developed a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop. Basically, the app was designed to prevent her from looking away at any cost. That's what the complaint says.

9:02Ryan Knutson:KGM's lawyers also say that features like Instagram's beauty filters, which digitally enhance a user's face, gave her body dysmorphia. During the trial, the plaintiff's lawyer submitted internal company documents from 2019 that he said show executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, knew that beauty filters could cause harm.

9:22Meghan Bobrowsky:They were temporarily banned in 2019, pending a review. Meta brought in 18 experts to take a look at this and sort of see whether it was doing harm to people and do a review of that. All 18 experts found that it was harmful. These filters were harmful to teenage girls. And so Zuckerberg and some other executives talk about it, what to do. And Zuckerberg said, basically, we didn't ultimately think there was enough harm to ban them completely, at least evidenced harm.

10:02Ryan Knutson:Meta defended the decision to bring back some of the beauty filters, saying that the company made tweaks to make them safer, like not recommending them to users.

10:13Ryan Knutson:KGM, the plaintiff, alleges that social media use as a teen also led her to struggles with suicidal thoughts, anxiety, and depression. In a statement, Metta said the full record will show a company that has consistently put teen safety ahead of growth for over a decade. Last week, Instagram CEO Adam Masseri was called to testify in KGM's trial. He said he didn't consider social media to be clinically addictive.

10:43Meghan Bobrowsky:One of the main things he did was try to draw a distinction between what is clinical addiction and what is sort of jokingly people talk about being addicted to social media. He was trying to make the point that that is different from being clinically addicted to something in the way that you are diagnosed as being addicted to something.

11:05Ryan Knutson:— Social media addiction is not an official standalone medical diagnosis. Some psychologists instead describe it as a form of behavioral addiction. The plaintiffs argue that it's clear Meta's apps are causing problems, and that Meta and other social media platforms have an economic incentive to keep users engaged. The more time they spend on their sites, the more ads they can show, and the more money they'll make.

11:34Meghan Bobrowsky:So I just walked out of the courtroom. So we've been in there all day hearing lots of testimony from Mark Zuckerberg. He was first cross-examined.

11:45Ryan Knutson:That's next.

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