A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge threatened to throw grieving mothers out of court Wednesday if they couldn’t stop crying during testimony from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who took the stand to defend his company’s app against allegations the product is harmful to children.
The social media addiction case is considered a bellwether that could shape the fate of thousands of other pending lawsuits, transforming the legal landscape for some of the world’s most powerful companies.
For many in the gallery, it was a chance to sit face to face with a man they hold responsible for their children’s deaths. Bereaved parents waited outside the Spring Street courthouse overnight in the rain for a place in the gallery, some breaking into sobs as he spoke.
“I can’t do this,” wept mom Lori Schott, whose daughter Annalee died by suicide after a years-long struggle with what she described as social media addiction. “I’m shaking, I couldn’t stop. It just destroyed her.”
Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl warned she would boot the moms if they could not contain their weeping.
“If there’s a violation of that order from me, I will remove you from the court,” the judge said.
Mosseri, by contrast, appeared cool and collected on the stand, wearing thick wire-framed glasses and a navy suit.
“It’s not good for the company over the long run to make decisions that profit us but are poor for people’s well-being,” he said during a combative exchange with attorney Mark Lanier, who represents the young woman at the center of the closely watched trial. “That’s eventually going to be very problematic for the company.”
Lanier’s client, a Chico, Calif., woman referred to as Kaley G.M., said she became addicted to social media as a grade-schooler, and charges that YouTube and Instagram were designed to hook young users and keep them trapped on the platforms. Two other defendants, TikTok and Snap, settled out of court.
Attorneys for the tech titans hit back, saying in opening statements Monday and Tuesday that Kaley’s troubled home life and her fractious relationship with her family were to blame for her suffering, not the platforms.
They also sought to discredit social media addiction as a concept, while trying to cast doubt on Kaley’s claim to the diagnosis.
“I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and problematic use,” Mosseri said Wednesday. “Sometimes we use addiction to refer to things more casually.”
On Wednesday, Meta attorney Phyllis Jones asked Mosseri directly whether Instagram targeted teenagers for profit.
“We make less money from teens than from any other demographic on the app,” Mosseri said. “We make much more the older you get.”
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the witness stand next week.
Kaley’s suit is being tried as a test case for a much larger group of actions in California state court. A similar — and similarly massive — set of federal suits are proceeding in parallel through California’s Northern District.
Mosseri’s appearance in Los Angeles on Wednesday follows a stinging legal blow in San Francisco earlier this week, where U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers blocked a plea by the tech giants to avoid their first trial there.
That trial — another bellwether involving a suit by Breathitt County School District in Kentucky — is now set to begin in San Francisco in June, after the judge denied companies’ motion for summary judgment. Defendants in both sets of suits have said the actions should be thrown out under a powerful 1996 law called Section 230 that shields internet publishers from liability for user content.
On Wednesday morning, Lanier hammered Mosseri over the controversial beauty filters that debuted on Instagram’s Stories function in 2019, showing an email chain in which Mosseri appeared to resist a ban on filters that mimicked plastic surgery.
Such filters have been linked by some research to the deepening mental health crisis in girls and young women, whose suicide rates have surged in recent years.
They have also been shown to drive eating disorders — by far the deadliest psychiatric illnesses — in teens. Those disorders continue to overwhelm providers years after other pandemic-era mental health crises have ebbed.
Earlier research linking social media and harms to young women was referenced in the November 2019 email chain reviewed in court Wednesday, in which one Instagram executive noted the filters “live on Instagram” and were “primarily used by teen girls.”
“There’s always a trade-off between safety and speech,” Mosseri said of the filters. “We’re trying to be as safe as possible but also censor as little as possible.”
The company briefly banned effects that “cannot be mimicked by makeup” and then walked the decision back amid fears Instagram would lose market share to less scrupulous actors.
“Mark [Zuckerberg] decided that the right balance was to focus on not allowing filters that promoted plastic surgery, but not those that did not,” Mosseri said. “I was never worried about this affecting our stock price.”
For Schott, seeing those decisions unfold almost a year to the day before her daughter’s death was too much to bear.
“They made that decision and they made that decision and they made that decision again — and my daughter’s dead in 2020,” she said. “How much more could that match? Timeline, days, decisions? Bam, she was dead.”
