Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously testified before Congress about the addictive nature of social media and the effect it has on kids and teens. Yesterday, for the first time, the Facebook founder testified before a jury in a liability lawsuit in Los Angeles on the same subject.

Our Emmy Griffin explained the case last week:

One plaintiff, referred to as “KGM,” is a 20-year-old who believes that social media addiction led to her psychological issues, including depression, body dysmorphic disorder, and self-harm. She began using YouTube, owned by Google, at the tender age of six and had access to Instagram, owned by Meta, at age nine. …

The trial will specifically address whether or not the jury finds Meta and Google liable for the deterioration of KGM’s mental health due to the addictive nature of their platforms.

Griffin noted that proving liability for Meta and others may be a heavy lift for several reasons, including the frequently cited Section 230. That provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act largely shields platforms from liability for user-generated content. However, those platforms have often behaved like publishers, “fact-checking” and censoring (primarily conservative) content in a tacit admission that social media changes behavior.

We know this all too well.

As for youth, The New York Times reports, “In internal documents that surfaced in some of the [other] lawsuits [facing the company], Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders repeatedly played down their platforms’ risks to young people, while rejecting employee pleas to bolster youth guardrails and hire additional staff.”

The Daily Wire adds, “Zuckerberg bolstered his argument by noting that less than 1% of Instagram’s revenue comes from teenagers, emphasizing the demographic has limited purchasing power and is therefore less attractive to advertisers. He argued that, from a business perspective, attracting teenagers is not ‘meaningful in the short term.’”

That may be, but if a product is meant to hook adults so they spend money, it will hook kids, too, if there are insufficient guardrails in place. Teen users also soon become adult users.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg largely stuck to his talking points, steering clear of anything that might be taken as an acknowledgment of Instagram’s addictive “qualities.” Still, he was confronted with a 2015 memo, in which the Times says he “encouraged executives to prioritize increasing the time that teenagers spend on Meta’s apps.”

Much more recently — November 2023 — Instagram head Adam Mosseri sent a memo to employees, saying, “As you are building out your 2024 plans, I’m asking that the business teams stay laser focused on 1) teens, particularly in developed markets and 2) Threads, and in that order.”

Oh.

In this particular case, Meta’s lawyers are trying to prove that KGM had a turbulent home life and that social media, including Instagram, was a coping mechanism, not the cause of her mental health issues.

It seems relevant that, in his 2024 congressional testimony, Zuckerberg turned to several families and offered what appeared to be a spontaneous apology. He told parents he was “sorry for everything you have all been through.” Maybe that was all scripted, but likely not. In any case, it wasn’t exactly an admission of guilt.

Yesterday, Zuckerberg said Instagram made a conscious decision to prioritize utility over time spent on the platform. His “basic assumption,” he explained, is that “if something is valuable, people will use it more because it’s useful to them.”

The idea that Instagram or any other social media platform isn’t actively doing everything possible to keep people scrolling and staring is absurd on its face. They go out of business if people don’t stay on the platforms, and their own internal documents belie his claim.

Ultimately, however, this is a tough case. No one wants to be on the other side of grieving parents who have lost children to suicide. No one wants to admit responsibility for harm to children.

You can say that parents should take charge of how their children use things, but as the parent of teenagers, I can tell you that, unless you keep them under lock and key, they will find ways to do dumb stuff. Heck, I was a teenager once myself.

As a Gen Xer, I grew up without any of this stuff. I learned to type on a typewriter. I didn’t even send an email until I was in college, and I got my first cellphone when my wife was pregnant with our first child. In other words, my brain was fully developed (cough, cough — I swear) by the time social media was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

For kids growing up in the last 20 years, however, separating fact from fiction or reality from make-believe is much harder because of social media. For example, there wouldn’t be a “transgender community” if it weren’t for Big Tech platforms.

Does that mean Meta and the rest are liable for every bad thing — or even just certain really bad things — that happens to a kid?

Some are looking to the Australian model of banning social media for kids. Some 86% of Americans want to hold platforms accountable for “predatory” social media addiction.

As for specific liability, this Los Angeles jury will go a long way to setting a precedent, one way or another.