Zuckerberg has repeatedly backed away from accusing Lanier of “mischaracterizing” his previous statements. When it came to emails, Zuckerberg typically objected on the grounds that the messages were aged or that they didn’t know the Meta employees involved. “I don’t think so,” he replied when asked to clarify whether he knew Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy in 2021. Zuckerberg never failed to point out when he wasn’t actually in an email thread introduced as evidence.
Perhaps anticipating these disconnected and repetitive statements from Zuckerberg – who has repeatedly argued that increased user engagement on Facebook and Instagram merely reflects the “value” of these apps – Lanier suggested early on that the CEO had been trained to address these issues. “You have extensive media training,” he said. “I think I’m widely known for being pretty bad at this,” Zuckerberg protested, drawing infrequent laughter from the courtroom. Lanier then presented Meta documents outlining Zuckerberg’s communication strategies, describing his team as “telling you what kind of answers you need to give,” including in contexts such as deposition under oath. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply,” Zuckerberg said. In the afternoon, Meta’s general counsel, Paul Schmidt, returned to this scope of questioning, asking whether Zuckerberg had to talk to the media because of his role as the head of a immense company. “More than I would like,” Zuckerberg said, drawing even more laughter.
In an even more, well, “meta” moment after the court returned from lunch, Kuhl struck a stern tone, warning everyone in the courtroom that anyone wearing “glasses that record” — such as the AI-equipped Oakley and Ray-Ban glasses sold by Meta for up to $499 — must remove them while attending the hearing, during which both video and audio recording are prohibited.
The KGM lawsuit and others to follow are novel because they circumvent Section 230, the law that protects tech companies from liability for user-generated content on their platforms. As such, Zuckerberg stuck to the playbook, which characterized the lawsuit as a fundamental misunderstanding of how Meta works. When Lanier presented evidence that Meta teams were working to augment the number of minutes users spent each day on their platforms, Zuckerberg responded that the company had long since moved away from those goals or that the numbers weren’t even “targets” per se, but merely measures of industry competitiveness. When Lanier asked whether Meta was simply hiding behind an age restriction policy that was “unenforced” and perhaps “unenforceable,” according to an email from Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, Zuckerberg calmly responded by talking about people circumventing protections despite ongoing improvements in this area.
But Lanier could always go back to KGM, who he said signed up for Instagram at age 9, about five years before the app started asking users about their birthdays in 2019. While Zuckerberg could have more or less gotten rid of internal data on, say, the need to turn teenagers into devoted teen users, or Meta’s explicit dismissal of the alarming expert analysis it commissioned on the dangers of Instagram’s “beauty filters,” he had no response prepared. Lanier’s grand finale: a billboard-sized tarp that took up half the width of the courtroom and took seven people to hold, with hundreds of posts from KGM’s Instagram account. As Zuckerberg blinked demanding at the huge display, evident only to him, Kuhl and the jury, Lanier said it was a measure of the time KGM spent on the app. “In a sense, you all own these photos,” he added. “I’m not sure that’s true,” Zuckerberg replied.
When Lanier finished and Schmidt was given the chance to push Zuckerberg to create an alternative vision of Meta as a utopia of connection and freedom of expression, the founder quickly gained momentum again. “I wanted people to have a good experience with it,” he said of the company’s platforms. And a moment later: “People naturally shift their time depending on what they consider valuable.”