The boss of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared as a witness on Wednesday in Los Angeles during the trial of social networks accused of having "manufactured addiction" in young users. Although he regretted that Instagram had not been banned for those under 13 years old earlier, he assured that he no longer sought to maximize the time spent on its platforms.

Published on: 02/19/2026 - 03:21 Modified on: 02/19/2026 - 08:18

Mark Zuckerberg publicly regretted, Wednesday February 18, the time taken by Instagram to limit the prohibited presence of users under 13 years old, during his hearing before a jury in Los Angeles, while trying to convince that Meta was no longer seeking to maximize the time spent on its platforms. During six hours of hearing at the trial of his group and Google, the CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) defended his company, sometimes ardently, at other times annoyed, during this testimony under oath, a first for him before a popular jury.

The two tech giants are accused by thousands of American families of having knowingly designed their respective platforms, Instagram and YouTube, to make them addictive for Internet users from childhood, which they refute.

Instagram waited until 2019 to ask their date of birth from people who wanted to create an account, before extending this obligation to existing users in 2021, then gradually verifying the veracity of these statements from 2022. “We have added new (detection) tools over the years,” recalled the co-founder of Facebook, witness number 1 in the trial. However, “I tell myself that we could have gotten there sooner,” he admitted.

Epidemic of depression, anxiety, anorexia...

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 at four million. Instagram estimated, at the time, that 30% of 10-12 year olds were on the network in the United States.

Also read: Ban on social networks for minors: what is France proposing?

In this case, twelve jurors of a civil court must determine by the end of March whether YouTube and Instagram are partly responsible for the mental health problems encountered by Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old Californian who experienced intensive consumption of social networks since childhood. In secret, she managed to register on Instagram in 2015, at just 9 years old.

This first case and two others similar to it, also judged in Los Angeles by the summer, were chosen to test the ways of resolving thousands of complaints accusing social networks of being responsible for an epidemic of depression, anxiety, anorexia, and even suicides among young people.

The lawyer of the young woman, present in the front row opposite the multi-billionaire, also returned to the fact that in December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg himself had set the objective of increasing the average time spent on Instagram by 12% over three years. “We had these goals,” admitted Mark Zuckerberg, “but after a while, I decided that our teams no longer needed to have goals for time spent (on Instagram), and we focused on usefulness and value.”

The time spent on the application, a “side effect”

Pounded on this subject or on that of the cosmetic surgery filters that he ended up authorizing on Instagram, the forty-year-old, initially imperturbable, began to show signs of annoyance, shaking his head then giving increasingly animated responses, determined to defend the fact that he had evolved. “If you create something that is not good for people, they may spend more time on it in the short term, but they will not be happy with it,” argued Mark Zuckerberg.

Faced with an internal document from 2022 still setting "milestones" (reaching 40 minutes per day per user in 2023, up to 46 in 2026), the boss disputed that these were objectives, presenting them rather as indicators of user satisfaction. In the afternoon, questioned by his own lawyer, a more relaxed Mark Zuckerberg, speaking more often to the jury, assured that the time spent on the application was a “side effect” of a quality experience.

Also read: Too young to scroll? Let’s talk about it with L. Miller, F. Didier and F. Saltiel

He also praised the regulatory tools put in place to help parents and young people, pushing the opposing party to put under his nose a 2023 document from Meta according to which only 1.1% of adolescents used the "daily time limit" function and 2% to "take a break".

The boss of Meta also took advantage of his questioning to reiterate his belief that Apple and Google, which market the systems operating most smartphones, should organize age verification at the device level rather than letting each application take care of it. Only the design of applications is concerned by the debates because American law almost completely exempts platforms from liability for published content.

TikTok and Snapchat preferred to sign a confidential agreement with Kaley G.M. before the trial but remain concerned by the other complaints.

With AFP

Keywords associated with the article

The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.