Mark Zuckerberg is trying to play it safe in his social media addiction trial testimony

Zuckerberg has repeatedly pushed back on accusing Lanier of “mischaracterizing” his previous statements. When it came to emails, Zuckerberg would typically object based on the age of the message, or his unfamiliarity with the Meta employees in question. “I don’t think so, no,” he replied when asked to clarify whether he knew Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy in 2021. And Zuckerberg never fails to point out that he was not actually involved in a series of emails that were entered into evidence.

Perhaps anticipating these discrete but recurring talking points from Zuckerberg — who has repeatedly claimed that any increased engagement from a user on Facebook or Instagram only reflects the “value” of those apps — Lanier suggested early on that the CEO had been trained to address these issues. “You have extensive media training,” he said. “I guess I’m known for being pretty bad at this,” Zuckerberg protested, drawing a rare laugh from the courtroom. Lanier went on to provide white papers outlining Zuckerberg’s communication strategies, describing his team as “telling you what kind of answers to give,” including in a context such as testifying under oath. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply,” Zuckerberg said. In the afternoon, Paul Schmidt, an advisor to Meta, returned to this type of question, asking whether Zuckerberg should speak to the media because of his role as head of a major company. “More than I want,” Zuckerberg said, amid more laughter.

In a more “meta” moment after the court returned from lunch, Cohl struck a stern tone by warning everyone in the room that anyone wearing “glasses that can record” — such as the AI-equipped Oakley and Ray-Ban glasses that Meta sells for up to $499 — must take them off while attending the proceedings, where video and audio recordings are prohibited.

KGM’s lawsuit and others following it are novel in their circumvention of Section 230, the law that protects technology companies from liability for user-generated content on their platforms. As such, Zuckerberg stuck to a playbook that portrayed the lawsuit as a fundamental misunderstanding of how meta works. When Lanier presented evidence that meta teams were working to increase the minutes users spent on their platforms each day, Zuckerberg responded that the company had long moved away from those goals, or that those numbers weren’t even “goals” per se, but merely measures of competitiveness within the industry. When Lanier questioned whether Meta was hiding behind an age limit policy that was “unenforced” and perhaps “unenforceable,” in an email from Nick Clegg, Meta’s former head of global affairs, Zuckerberg quietly deviated from a narrative about people circumventing their safeguards despite ongoing improvements on that front.

However, Lanier can always come back to KGM, who said he signed up for Instagram at the age of nine, about five years before the app started asking users for their birthday in 2019. And while Zuckerberg could have more or less ignored internal data on, say, the need to convert tweens into loyal teen users, or Meta’s apparent dismissal of the alarming expert analysis they commissioned on the dangers of Instagram’s “beauty filters,” he didn’t have a response prepared for Lanier’s grand finale: a rag the size of The billboard, which takes up half the width of the courtroom and requires seven people to carry it, is among hundreds of posts from KGM’s Instagram account. As Zuckerberg looked intently at the expansive screen, visible only to himself, Cole, and the jury, Lanier said that was a measure of the enormous amount of time KGM had spent on the app. “In a sense, you all own these photos,” he added. “I’m not sure that’s accurate,” Zuckerberg replied.

When Lanier finished his work and Schmidt had the opportunity to prepare Zuckerberg for an alternative vision of Meta as a utopia of communication and free expression, the founder quickly gained his stride again. “I wanted people to have a good experience with it,” he said of the company’s platforms. Then after a moment: “People naturally change their time according to what they find valuable.”