The post Zuckerberg defends Instagram in child addiction trial, but his own paper trail may be his worst enemy appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Mark Zuckerberg testified in a Los Angeles federal courtroom this week, defending Instagram against claims that the platform was built to hook children and teenagers, and that Meta knew it was causing serious psychological harm all along. It is the first time the Meta CEO has faced a jury on questions of child safety. The trial centers on a woman now in her 20s, identified only by her initials, KGM, who says she became addicted to social media as a young girl. She started using Instagram at age nine. She says that excessive use made her depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide worse. Her lawyers say she sometimes spent more than 16 hours on the app in a single day. YouTube is also named in the lawsuit. TikTok and Snapchat settled before the trial got underway. The outcome could affect roughly 1,600 similar lawsuits filed across the country and may force the platforms to pay out billions of dollars or make major changes to how they work. At the heart of the case is whether Meta and Google deliberately built features, things like infinite scroll, push notifications, and personalized algorithms, knowing they would harm young users psychologically, and whether the companies hid what they knew. Lawyers say Zuckerberg pushed to target kids as young as 11 NPR technology reporter Bobby Allyn, who was in the courtroom, said Zuckerberg was visibly uncomfortable on the stand. He pushed back repeatedly against the plaintiff’s lawyers, saying things like “you’re mischaracterizing me” and “that’s not what I said at all.” But lawyers were trying to show that Zuckerberg himself had pushed to bring in children as young as 11 years old and keep them on the platform as long as possible, using features like likes, beauty filters, and alerts. Zuckerberg told the court he…

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Filed under: News - @ February 19, 2026 5:28 pm