Overview
- On the stand, the Meta CEO acknowledged failures in Instagram’s under‑13 age checks and said he wished fixes had come sooner, while noting his voting control could withstand a board firing.
- Jurors are examining claims that Meta and Google engineered features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and likes to maximize time spent by young users rather than assessing user content.
- Plaintiffs presented internal Meta and YouTube documents, including a memo about courting preteens and references to YouTube as a short‑term “digital babysitter.”
- The proceedings function as bellwethers for 22 cases tied to roughly 1,600 plaintiffs after TikTok and Snapchat settled related claims, with testimony set to continue through March and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan expected to appear.
- Meta contests causation and attributes harms to family dynamics, while the lead plaintiff, who began using YouTube at 6 and Instagram at 9, alleges compulsive use and mental‑health damage.