Zuckerberg denies Instagram was built to hook children

Mark Zuckerberg testified in a Los Angeles federal courtroom this week, defending Instagram against claims that the platform was built to hook children and teenagers, and that Meta knew it was causing serious psychological harm all along.

It is the first time the Meta CEO has faced a jury on questions of child safety.

The trial centers on a woman now in her 20s, identified only by her initials, KGM, who says she became addicted to social media as a young girl. She started using Instagram at age nine. She says that excessive use made her depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide worse. Her lawyers say she sometimes spent more than 16 hours on the app in a single day.

YouTube is also named in the lawsuit. TikTok and Snapchat settled before the trial got underway. The outcome could affect roughly 1,600 similar lawsuits filed across the country and may force the platforms to pay out billions of dollars or make major changes to how they work.

At the heart of the case is whether Meta and Google deliberately built features, things like infinite scroll, push notifications, and personalized algorithms, knowing they would harm young users psychologically, and whether the companies hid what they knew.

Lawyers say Zuckerberg pushed to target kids as young as 11

NPR technology reporter Bobby Allyn, who was in the courtroom, said Zuckerberg was visibly uncomfortable on the stand. He pushed back repeatedly against the plaintiff’s lawyers, saying things like “you’re mischaracterizing me” and “that’s not what I said at all.”

But lawyers were trying to show that Zuckerberg himself had pushed to bring in children as young as 11 years old and keep them on the platform as long as possible, using features like likes, beauty filters, and alerts.

Zuckerberg told the court he was “focused on building a community that is sustainable” and denied that the company seeks to make its platforms addictive to younger users.

Until now, this law has effectively stopped most lawsuits against companies like Meta. What is different this time is the legal angle; lawyers are treating Instagram and YouTube as defective products, comparing them to tobacco companies that deliberately targeted young people to create addiction while hiding evidence of harm.

Internal documents show Meta knew and said nothing

Zuckerberg can push back against lawyers all he wants in the courtroom, but the documents his own company produced may be harder to walk away from.

That comparison can be found in the unsealed internal documents from Meta. Those records were made public in November 2025 as part of a massive consolidated lawsuit involving more than 1,600 plaintiffs, and they paint a troubling picture.

Cryptopolitan previously reported on how Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public when these filings, reviewed by TIME first came to light.

Internal research from 2018 found that 58% of 20,000 Facebook users surveyed in the US showed some level of social media addiction. One researcher inside the company wrote at the time that the product “exploits weaknesses in human psychology” to drive engagement.

A separate internal study found that users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week reported lower levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

Meta shut down this research and never published the results. One employee reportedly asked in writing whether keeping the findings private would make the company look like tobacco companies that hid research showing cigarettes were harmful.

Despite knowing by 2017 that its products were addictive to children, Meta’s internal messages show the company stayed focused on growth. Zuckerberg reportedly said that increasing teen time spent on the platforms should be “our top goal of 2017.” Internal documents from 2024 still described getting new teenage users as “mission critical” for Instagram.

The documents also show that in a single day in 2022, Instagram’s recommendation feature pushed 1.4 million potentially inappropriate adult accounts to teenage users. The company did not begin rolling out privacy protections for minors by default until 2024, seven years after it had identified the dangers to young users.

Meta also used location data to send push notifications to students during school hours, calling them internally “school blasts.” One employee wrote that the goal was to get students to sneak a look at their phones under their desks during class.

A separate report found that Instagram’s safety tools repeatedly failed to protect minors even after the company publicly claimed to have fixed the problem.

Meta also announced sweeping changes to how the company moderates content across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, just weeks before the trial kicked off. It drew sharp criticism from child safety groups.

The jury’s decision will ripple well beyond this one courtroom, potentially reshaping how the world’s largest social media companies are allowed to operate.

Sharpen your strategy with mentorship + daily ideas - 30 days free access to our trading program