Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at California trial
wsj.comThe whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a reasonable empathetic person.
That's what Meta paid for.
Plz enlighten me about the payment. As in meta bought advertisement in wsj?
That’s exactly the lens they were hoping for
I guess so, I expected a little more nuance to hide it better. but it was just blatant. like any child could figure it out
Plenty of adults don't catch it either. You don't need to be blatant. Dress it up in neutral business language, keep the arguments one step removed from the conclusion, and anchor it in assumptions people already hold about markets and American institutions. Then it's nearly impossible to push back on without sounding like you're attacking the premises.
The journalistic version of the “I’m kidnapped” hand signal.
That’s what the WSJ is there for
You were expecting it to be fair and balanced? What's speaks volumes on murdoch is the WSJ will criticize trump in ways that are heresy on foxnews.
Wsj is always pro-corporate
“The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to invest in science research”
That’s an impressive amount of arrogance.
Find this to be plausible, meta needs to do more science of how to make things more addictive…
But you don’t understand. There won’t be any science if he is taxed because then he will leave and take all the money with him.
He is producing all the value, he doesn’t need anything from other people or the system that made him
Alternative source:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/mark-zuckerberg-gr...
Text-only, no Javascript, HTTPS optional:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WBSLI...
Simple HTML:
{
x=AA1WBSLI
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x'/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmThere's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.
Wat mean?
Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"
Have you ever tried quitting smoking?
Easy. I've done it five times in the last three years alone.
I don't think this is what quitting means, or was that part of the joke?
That was the joke: it's not easy to quit smoking.
That seems like a bizarre comparison. Is TikTok high in nicotine?
Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.
The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive
It means it's addictive
When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.
There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
Alternatively, it may mean that people are largely hypocritical, and evaluate themselves and other people by different standards.
I have observed people who objectively were destroying their lives and yet they themselves were happily in denial.
The clichéd and sadly true "I am in control I can stop everything is fine".
Humans are strange.
1. Because people like it. 2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
From a Rolling Stone article:
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
"How does that even work?"
There is a master complaint and each plaintiff files a short-form complaint
Because the injuries will vary from plaintiff to plaintiff class action will not suffice. This is why each plaintiff must file individually
To learn more: https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/articles
Here is the master complaint for the personal injury plaintiffs
https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Here is the short-form complaint for personal injury (for individuals)
https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Here is the master complaint for the local government/school district plaintiffs
https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Here is the short-form complaint for public nusiance (for local governments, school districts)
https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Hypothetical for discussion
Corporation's lobbyists, or some other circumstances, prevent the establishment of any meaningful regulatory framework that would effectively produce a desired change in the corporation's behaviour
However the threat of thousands of "cash grabs" through private litigation causes the desired change in the corporation's behaviour even in the absence of a regulatory framework
What are the pros and cons
For example, one could argue that the "cash grabs" pose a greater problem than the corporate behaviour that would occur in their absence, or vice versa
My siblings are better informed, I just wanted to say, settlements don’t get paid unless there’s a risk the plaintiff could win.
Not true at all. In fact settlements mostly happen because it would cost significantly more for a company to go through discovery and argue their case in court regardless of the eventual result. And court systems strongly encourage settlements to save their own time. There an entire industry of patent trolls and sleazy personal injury lawyers in business because of this.
The American jury system is always a wildcard.
A judge can be predicted, it's all about facts and evidence, 12 randos means rolling the dice.
Not sure about that, don't defendants sometimes settle because they don't want the publicity of a trial or don't want their dirty laundry being aired in discovery?
Not always. Sometimes it’s as simple as: settling is cheaper than proving you’re “clear” at trial.
No one wants to go through discovery if they don't have to. These companies are flush with cash and can pay to make that problem go away.
I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.
That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.
In legal terms they often call this a "nuisance fee", although it's normally much smaller when the defendant thinks there is a 100% chance they will win but just wants to avoid all the costs.
She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and suicidality she experienced.
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
Reminder that Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], an "anti big tech" PAC, consisting of 50 conservative groups that include Moms for Liberty, Focus on the Family and Morality in Media, that pushes age verification and the end of anonymity online[2].
The goal is to use the current moral panic to usher in identity verification systems that collect biometrics just to see or share user-generated content online, which is very convenient for companies like Meta and Anthropic[3] who need mountains of biometric and identifying data to train their systems and monetize users.
The other goal is to force all user-generated content on the internet to go through Meta/Anthropic/OpenAI/etc's AI-powered moderation systems. That means the companies will get to train on the totality of all user-generated content on the internet into perpetuity and get paid to do so.
[1] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2025/07/25/83...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/opinion-the-child-...
I have been snickering at the term "grilled" for years now. All of the aggressive bullshit language being used to retell these accounts is nonsense: NOTHING HAPPENED. Nobody is held accountable, and they just got nagged at in front of class for a bit.
If you asked me, "Hey do you want to make billions of dollars breaking the law, but you might have to sit in front of some cameras every few years and answer fake questions in front of people with dementia?", then I could understand someone thinking that's easy money.
Yeah, but those Reels are getting Thousands of Likes and Shares!
That pays the creator probably thousands of pennies!
"The memes will continue"
Really, what's the point of asking a CEO anything? Same for a politician. Just get their emails and quit with the circuses.
I still don’t get why people are still on Meta platforms. Shut down your accounts and switch to alternatives. Meta/Zuckerberg are disgusting.
The billionaire class rules over all of us but yet is never found responsible - how do you call such a system?
If this is a real litigation process, I wonder what would be the conditions Meta will need to accept for them to let it go.
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
That’s a perjury.
I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.
Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.
Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.
Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India Company but the screws persist.
But "capitalism" doesn't actually exist as such -- it's just a concept that represents patterns of human behavior that stem from human beings' pre-existing motivations inclinations.
Treating descriptive models as the causal factors behind the things they're describing is a reification fallacy.
Thank you for making it clearer for myself why it irks me when "capitalism" is used this way.
Which part is perjury? Can you prove that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think his apps deliver something useful to the users? As far as the attracting kids part, well, that’s the entire premise of the trial, no?
> which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by almost everyone, though, as an analogy?
> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
This was the funniest / most evil testimony I’ve seen, in any case, in a while.
Couldn’t find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he testified they don’t care about increasing user engagement (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there’s always a lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up to and including 2024.
Basically, "I'll lie right to your face for my entertainment because this is a circus and we're all clowns. Now make with the tech tax cuts."
Mark Parilla haha
Some alternative reporting:
https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-social...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mark-zucke...
Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.
@dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.
Oh wow they’re really holding him to account by asking some interesting questions then letting him get back to it.
/s
Agreed - such useless pageantry. At least with meat, 'grilling' changes it.