A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge threatened to throw grieving mothers out of court Wednesday if they couldn’t stop crying while testifying against Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who stepped in to defend his company’s app against allegations that the product is harmful to children.
The social media addiction case is seen as a bellwether that could shape the fate of thousands of other pending cases, changing the legal landscape for some of the world’s most powerful companies.
For many who were in the gallery, it was a chance to sit face to face with the man they hold responsible for the death of their children. Bereaved parents waited outside the Spring Street courthouse at night in the rain for a place in the gallery, some crying as he spoke.
“I can’t do this,” cried mother Lori Schott, whose daughter Annalee died by suicide after years of struggling with what she described as an addiction to social media. “I’m shaking, I couldn’t stop.
Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl warned that she would ostracize the mothers if they couldn’t stop crying.
“If there is a violation of that order from me, I will take you to court,” said the judge.
Mosseri, in contrast, appeared cool and collected on the stand, wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses and a navy suit.
“It’s not good for the company to take decisions that will benefit us but are not good for the welfare of the people,” he said during an interview with attorney Mark Lanier, who represents the young woman at the center of the highly anticipated case. “That’s ultimately going to be a big problem for the company.”
Lanier’s client, a Chico, Calif. woman named Kaley GM, said she became addicted to social media as a high school student, and alleges that YouTube and Instagram are designed to recruit new users and keep them locked away from social media. The other two defendants, TikTok and Snap, settled out of court.
Lawyers for the tech titans hit back, saying in statements Monday and Tuesday that Kaley’s troubled home life and strained relationship with her family were the cause of her suffering, not the pitches.
They also sought to discredit social media addiction as a concept, while attempting to cast doubt on Kaley’s claim about the diagnosis.
“I think it’s important to distinguish between clinical addiction and problematic use,” Mosseri said Wednesday. “Sometimes we use addiction to take things for granted.”
On Wednesday, Meta’s lawyer Phyllis Jones asked Mosseri directly whether Instagram is targeting young people for profit.
“We make less money on youth than any other demographic in the app,” Mosseri said. “We do a lot more when you grow up.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the witness stand next week.
Kaley’s case is being tried as the largest class action in California state court. A similar — and equally large — set of federal suits continues in parallel in the Northern District of California.
Mosseri’s appearance in Los Angeles on Wednesday follows a tough legal battle in San Francisco earlier this week, when US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers blocked a request by tech officials to avoid their first trial there.
That trial — another case involving a suit by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky — is now set to begin in San Francisco in June, after a judge denied the companies’ request for summary judgment. The defendants in both sets of suits said the actions should be dismissed under a powerful 1996 law called Section 230 that protects Internet publishers from liability for user content.
On Wednesday morning, Lanier called out Mosseri for the controversial beauty filters that went live on Instagram’s Stories in 2019, showing an email chain in which Mosseri appeared to oppose the banning of filters that mimic plastic surgery.
Such filters have been linked by some research to the depth of the mental health problem in girls and young women, whose suicide rates have increased significantly in recent years.
They have also been shown to drive eating disorders – the most deadly mental illnesses – in young people. Those problems continue to frustrate providers years after some of the mental health problems of the epidemic era have ended.
Previous research linking social media and harm to young women was shown in a November 2019 email series reviewed in court Wednesday, where one Instagram executive noted that filters “live on Instagram” and are “mostly used by teenage girls.”
“There’s always a trade-off between security and speech,” Mosseri said of the filters. “We try to be as safe as possible but also test as little as possible.”
The company briefly banned effects that “cannot be imitated by makeup” and then reversed the decision out of fear that Instagram would lose market share to less-observant players.
“Mark [Zuckerberg] decided that the right balance focused on disallowing filters that promote plastic surgery, but not those that don’t,” said Mosseri.
For Schott, seeing those decisions happen almost a year to the day before her daughter’s death was too much for her to bear.
“They made that decision and they made that decision and they made that decision again – and my daughter dead in 2020,” he said. The timeline, the dates, the decisions? Bam, he was dead.”
