Brian Boland spent over a decade figuring out how to build a system that made money from meta. On Thursday, he told a California jury that this encouraged Facebook and Instagram to attract more users, including teenagers, despite the risks.
Boland’s testimony comes a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a case over whether Meta and YouTube are liable for allegedly harming a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg defined Meta’s mission as balancing security with free expression rather than revenue. Boland’s role was to counter this by explaining how Meta makes money, and how this shaped the design of his platform. Boland testified that Zuckerberg fostered a culture that prioritized growth and profits over the well-being of users from the top down. He said he has been described as a whistleblower – a term that META has largely sought to limit out of fear that it would prejudice the jury, but which the judge has generally allowed. During his 11 years at Meta, Boland said he went from having a “deep blind faith” in the company to a “firm belief that competition and power and growth were the things Mark Zuckerberg cared about most.”
Boland last served as Meta’s VP of Partnerships before leaving in 2020, working to bring content to the platform that it could monetize, and previously worked in various advertising roles starting in 2009. He testified that Facebook’s infamous early slogan “Move fast and break things” represented “a cultural ethos at the company”. He said the idea behind the motto was generally, “Don’t really think about what could go wrong with a product, but just get it out there and learn and see.” At the height of its prominence internally, employees would sit down to look at a piece of paper at their desks that read, “What will you break today?” Boland testified.
“Priorities were on winning growth and engagement”
According to Boland, Zuckerberg continually made clear his priorities for the company. He’ll announce them at all meetings and leave no doubt about what the company should focus on, whether it’s making its products mobile-first, or getting ahead of the competition. When Zuckerberg realized that then-Facebook had to prepare to compete with a rumored Google social network competitor (which he did not name, but referred to Google+), Boland recalled a digital countdown clock in the office that showed how much time he had left to achieve his goals during what the company called a “lockdown.” During his tenure at the company, Boland testified, there was never any lockdown regarding user security, and Zuckerberg reportedly told engineers that “the priorities were on growth and winning engagement.”
Meta has repeatedly denied that it seeks to maximize users’ engagement on its platform rather than protect their well-being. In past weeks, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified that creating platforms that users enjoy and feel good about is in their long-term interests, and that’s what drives their decisions.
Boland disputes this. He testified, “My experience was that while there were opportunities to really try to understand what harms the products were doing to the world, they were not a priority.” “They were more of a problem than an opportunity to fix.”
When security issues came up through press reports or regulatory questions, Boland said, “the primary response was to figure out how to manage through the press cycle, what the media was saying, as opposed to saying, ‘Let’s take a step back and really dig deeper.’ Although Boland said he told his advertising-focused team that they should look for “broken parts” instead of inside the company, he said that philosophy did not extend to the rest of the company.
On the stand a day earlier, Zuckerberg pointed to documents from around 2019 that showed disagreement with his decisions among his employees, saying he has demonstrated a culture that encourages diversity of thought. However, Boland testified that although this may have been the case earlier in his tenure, it later became “a very closed culture”.
“There is no moral algorithm, it is not a thing… neither eats, sleeps, nor cares.”
Since the jury can only consider decisions and products that Meta has created itself, not content hosted by users, lead plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier also asked Boland to describe how Meta’s algorithm works, and the decisions that went into creating and testing it. The algorithms have “immense power”, Boland said, and they are “absolutely relentless” in pursuing their programmed goals – in many cases, this was allegedly the case in Meta. “There is no ethical algorithm, that’s not a thing,” Boland said. “Neither eats, nor sleeps, nor cares.”
During his testimony on Wednesday, Zuckerberg commented that Boland “developed some strong political opinions” toward the end of her time at the company. (Neither Zuckerberg nor Boland provided specifics, but in a 2025 blog post, Boland indicated he was deleting his Facebook account in part due to disagreement with the way Meta was handling incidents like January 6, writing that he believed “Facebook had contributed to spreading ‘Stop the Steal’ propaganda and enabling this coup attempt.”) Lanier spent time establishing that Boland was being criticized by peers. Was honored by, making a splash. cnbc The article about his departure quoted a glowing statement from his then-boss, and referenced an unnamed source who reportedly described Boland as a man of strong moral character.
On cross-examination, Meta attorney Phyllis Jones explained that Boland did not serve on teams appointed to understand youth safety at the company. Boland agreed that advertising business models are not inherently bad, and neither are algorithms. He also acknowledged that many of his concerns relate to the content being posted by users, which is not relevant to the present case.
During his direct examination, Lanier asked whether Boland had ever expressed his concerns directly to Zuckerberg. Boland said he told the CEO he had seen data showing “harmful consequences” of the company’s algorithms and suggested they investigate further. He recalled Zuckerberg responding, “I hope there are still things you’re proud of.” He stepped down soon after, he said.
Boland said he left more than $10 million worth of uninvested Meta stock on the table when he left, although he acknowledged he had made more than that over the years. He said he feels nervous whenever he speaks about the company. “This is an incredibly powerful company,” he said.
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