Zuckerberg repeatedly accused Lanier of “misrepresenting” his past statements. When it comes to emails, Zuckerberg typically objects on the grounds of how old the message was, or his lack of familiarity with the Meta employees involved. When asked to clarify whether he knew Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy in 2021, he replied, “I don’t think so, no.”
Perhaps anticipating these detached and repetitive remarks from Zuckerberg – who repeatedly claimed that a user’s increased engagement on Facebook or Instagram only reflects the “value” of those apps – Lanier suggested early on that the CEO be trained to address these issues. “You have extensive media training,” he said. “I think I know I’m very bad at this job,” Zuckerberg protested, drawing a rare laugh from the courtroom. Lanier presented meta documents outlining communications strategies for Zuckerberg, describing his team as “out there to tell you what kind of answers to give”, including references such as testifying under oath. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” Zuckerberg said. In the afternoon, Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt returned to that line of questioning, asking whether Zuckerberg had to talk to the media because of his role as the head of a major business. “More than I would like,” Zuckerberg said with more laughter.
In an even more “Meta” moment after the court returned from lunch, Kuhl struck a stern tone by warning everyone in the room that anyone wearing “recording glasses” — such as the AI-equipped Oakley and Ray-Ban glasses sold by Meta for up to $499 — must remove them while attending the proceedings, where both video and audio recording are prohibited.
KGM’s lawsuit and others that followed are the latest in a move to circumvent Section 230, a law that protected tech companies from liability for content created by users on their platforms. Thus, Zuckerberg stuck to a playbook that framed the lawsuit as a fundamental misunderstanding of how meta works. When Lanier presented evidence that Meta teams were working on increasing the minutes users spend on its platform each day, Zuckerberg said the company had long ago moved beyond those objectives, or that those numbers were not even “goals”, merely metrics of competitiveness within the industry. When Lanier questioned whether Meta was simply hiding behind an age limit policy that was “unenforceable” and perhaps “unenforceable,” according to an email from Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, Zuckerberg calmly deflected the attention with a narrative about people bypassing its security measures despite consistent improvements on that front.
Lanier, however, can always return to KGM, saying he signed up for Instagram at age 9, about five years before the app started asking users for their birthdays in 2019. While Zuckerberg could have more or less ignored internal data, like, say, the need to convert tweens into loyal teen users, or Meta’s blatant rejection of the alarming expert analysis done on the risks of Instagram’s “beauty filters,” he didn’t have a pre-packaged response. Lanier’s grand finale: a billboard-sized tarpaulin that took up half the width of the courtroom and required seven people to hold up hundreds of posts from KGM’s Instagram account. As Zuckerberg blinked vigorously at the giant display, visible only to himself, Kuhl and the jury, Lanier said it was a measure of the enormous amount of time KGM had put into the app. “In a way, you all own these photos,” he said. Zuckerberg replied, “I’m not sure that’s accurate.”
When Lanier finished the job and Schmidt was given the chance to pitch Zuckerberg to an alternative vision of Meta as a utopia of connection and free expression, the founder quickly hit his stride again. “I wanted people to have a good experience with it,” he said of the company’s platform. Then, a moment later: “People naturally allocate their time according to what they find valuable.”
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