Escalation: Zuckerberg Testifies on Instagram Youth Policies

Mark Zuckerberg defended Instagram’s rule barring users under 13, while acknowledging many children still join by lying about their age. He said Meta has gotten better at identifying and removing underage accounts, adding, “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.” After extended questioning on age checks, he said, “I don’t see why this is so complicated.”

Questioning walked him through internal documents stating that 11-year-olds were four times more likely to keep returning to Meta’s apps, that an estimated 30% of 10- to 12-year-olds in the U.S. used Instagram, and that the company aimed to increase the time 10-year-olds spent on the app. Another 2018 document said, “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” He said he did not recall the context of a decade-old email and described the goal as building useful services for people.

He was pressed on appearance-altering “beauty filters” after experts warned of body-image harms. He said the company chose to stop recommending such filters but still let people use them. The lawyer then unfurled a roughly 35-foot-wide collage of the plaintiff’s selfies and asked whether her account had been examined for heavy use as a child; he said staff had shown him some posts and did not say whether the account was reviewed.

In the courtroom, a lawyer at one point projected a hand-drawn frowning stick figure on a screen in front of him. Several attendees wore Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses, and the judge warned that anyone recording with them could be held in contempt.

AI-synthesized from multiple reported sources