Instagram head Adam Mosseri testifies in child social media addiction trial in Los Angeles
Mosseri is the first technology executive to testify in the landmark social media trial against Google and Meta over YouTube and Instagram.
I spoke with The Wrap about what it’s like to cover the landmark social media addiction trial. Media Editor Michael Calderone’s article published today. I’m back at the courthouse this afternoon for the end of Stanford Universitry professor Anna Lembke’s testimony.
The leader of Instagram this week walked back statements he made in 2020 about the addictiveness of social media after confronted with them by a plaintiff’s lawyer in a landmark child addiction trial in Los Angeles.
“I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and chronic use,” Adam Mosseri told plaintiff’s lawyer Mark Lanier.
He said Lanier used the word addiction “cavalierly,” and he disagreed with Lanier’s statement, “There’s such a thing as being addicted to a social media platform.” Mosseri said he doesn’t believe chronic use “is the same as clinical addiction.”
Lanier soon revealed that the statement was made by Mosseri himself, taken from a 2020 podcast interview, and he asked if he agrees “There’s such a thing as being addicted to a social media platform.”
“I disagree. I’m sure I said it, but I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and chronic use,” he said. Mosseri said he believes it’s possible to use social media “more than you feel good about.”
Mosseri testified in Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s courtroom on Wednesday for the entire third day of trial in a lawsuit against Meta and Google that alleges Instagram and YouTube are intentionally addictive and harmed a now 20-year-old woman’s mental health beginning in her young childhood.
The public gallery included several parents of young people who died in tragedies linked to social media such as suicides because of bullying and sexual abuse and fatal overdoses on drugs bought from people they met online. Some stayed on the courthouse steps overnight to secure one of the 15 public seats. (The court has since implemented a lottery system.)
When the jury was out of the courtroom for a recess, Judge Kuhl admonished the gallery not to react to or speak during testimony.
“Mr. Lanier is perfectly capable of conducting cross-examination of witnesses,” said Kuhl, who has been a judge since 1995.
She said the jury’s verdict must be based on the evidence “not based on someone’s views of that evidence.”
Victoria Hinks, whose daughter Alexandra “Owl” Hinks committed suicide last year, told reporters she couldn’t help but cry during Mosseri’s testimony.
“Crying is involuntary. I wasn’t hysterical, but tears came out of my eyes when I sat there and looked at him up on the stand saying … they didn’t approve filters for things that could only be done with makeup and not surgery, because I know that that was not what my daughter experienced,” Hinks said.
Mosseri’s answers were “a lot of fluff pieces” and “some of it just seemed very condescending.”
“Our children were the first guinea pigs in this cohort of this social media experiment, and they were collateral damage,” Hinks said.
Mosseri’s testimony came after jurors spent Tuesday hearing from Anna Lembke, a Stanford University professor and addiction expert who testified about the addictive nature of social media platforms.
“It essentially drugifies human connection,” Lembke said.
Lembke continued testifying on Friday; Judge Kuhl allowed Mosseri to testify before she finished because of his schedule.
‘That sounds like problematic use’
Lanier, a Houston, Texas-based mass torts lawyer, used an aggressive tone from the beginning of Mosseri’s examination. He pushed back when Mosseri said he wasn’t an expert on legal techniques after Lanier asked if he knew he’d been called as an adverse witness, which entitles Lanier to ask him leading questions like in a cross-examination.
“I’m happy to answer any and all questions,” Mosseri said.
“Well, you’ve given a deposition before? Haven’t you?” Lanier asked.
Mosseri said he had but he didn’t know how many times.
Lanier also was skeptical when Mosseri said his job title is “head of Instagram.”
“If we look it up on the corporate tree, it says, head?” Lanier asked.
“I think so,” Mosseri answered.
Lanier then began asking Mosseri if he agreed with a series of statements.
Mosseri hesitated to agree with the first, that “Instagram should do everything it can to keep people safe, especially minors,” instead only saying he agrees they should try to keep “everyone” safe. He soon relented and said, “I agree with the statement.”
Mosseri also didn’t agree when Lanier said “problematic use of Instagram is real,” saying instead that Instagram uses the phrase “problematic use” to refer to people who spend more time on Instagram “than they feel good about.”
Mosseri agreed it’s possible for someone to use Instagram too much but emphasized “it depends on the person.”
That’s when Lanier told him the statements presented to him were his own.
Mosseri said he’s “sure” he said during the 2020 podcast interview what Lanier repeated on Wednesday: “there’s such a thing as being addicted to a social media platform.” But he testified he disagrees with the statement now.
Mosseri said he believes it’s possible to use social media “more than you feel good about.”
Mosseri said he has someone “very close in my life” who has a “very serious clinical addiction” and he believes it’s a serious issue that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
“Are you suggesting we are taking the word addiction lightly?” Lanier asked.
“I’m not suggesting that at all,” Mosseri answered.
Lanier said “please understand we’re sorry” that Mosseri knows someone who has an addiction, “but that does not qualify you to make decisions with what’s clinical addiction and what’s not, does it?”
Mosseri said he’s not trying to present himself as a clinical expert.
Lanier asked if he was “careful” with his words when he said “problematic use” and “There’s such a thing as being addicted.”
“No, clearly I wasn’t being careful with my words,” Mosseri testified.
Lanier later asked Mosseri if he knows the plaintiff, who’s identified in court as Kaley G.M., once used Instagram for 16 hours in one day.
“I did not know that,” Mosseri testified.
“That’s problematic use, isn’t it?” Lanier asked.
“That sounds like problematic use,” Mosseri answered.
‘Move fast and break things’
Lanier moved into questions about Mosseri’s multimillion dollar compensation after getting him to agree that child safety is more important “than the money you make.”
Mosseri testified he earns $900,000 annually with a possible bonus of up to half that, but his major earnings come through equity stock payments every three months that can total upwards of $10 million each year.
“Sometimes upwards of $20 million?” Lanier asked.
“Uh, I believe so,” Mosseri answered.
Lanier asked if he’s made $45 million to $50 million in “the last five years or so” and Mosseri answered, “I would estimate around there.”
Mosseri testified that protecting minors is “good for business and profit” and Instagram should focus on the “long-term health and wellbeing” of everyone who uses it.
“So sometimes you think it’s appropriate for the company to profit now and test later, as opposed to always testing first and protecting minors?” Lanier asked.
“Sometimes neither of those doors are appropriate options,” Mosseri answered. “This is an oversimplification of our options.”
Lanier continued presenting Mosseri with options he called “doors,” and asking him which he’d choose, including “do we move fast, deal with the damage later, or do we measure the risk and make sure our top priority is protecting minors?”
Mosseri said the second option is best because moving too quickly can result in mistakes that must be corrected, which led to Lanier asking about a slogan “up in Silicon Valley about moving fast or something?”
Mosseri said “that was on the wall in the very early days”
“What did it say?” Lanier asked.
“It said ‘move fast and break things,’” Mosseri answered. Mosseri said Facebook “moved away from it very consciously,” and he’s not trying to justify the slogan and he “doesn’t particularly like the slogan.”
He said “it’s important to remember the context” in which the slogan existed: Facebook was trying to surpass other websites like MySpace and Friendster.
“This is a bad slogan when you’re dealing with mental health of minors, true?” Lanier asked.
Mosseri said yes and the slogan “wasn’t appropriate then.” Lanier asked if he’s heard Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg say it and Mosseri answered, “Not that I can recall.”
‘a trade off between safety and speech’
Lanier used the compensation and company slogan questions as a lead in to questions about Instagram filters that can alter a photo of someone to add cosmetic affects, which Mosseri said was a “big debate” within Instagram.
Lanier displayed an email chain in which an Instagram employees seeks support for a policy change “to disallow effects that mimic plastic surgery.”
“In practice, we had trouble defining that,” Mosseri said, because the line between makeup affects and plastic surgery is “thin.”
In the email chain, Andrew Bosworth, now Meta’s chief technology officer, said he mentioned the filter ban to Zuckerberg “and he might want to review before implementing.”
“He’s concerned about whether we have good enough data that this represents real harm,” Bosworth wrote.
Another employee said a “blanket ban” on plastic surgery filters “is going to hurt us in the competitive marketplace.”
Mosseri testified that Instagram doesn’t “make money from filters.” He said the issue is not “about revenue” but “about businesses” and wanting “to be relevant.”
An employee mentioned a “PR fire” related to the filters, and Lanier asked Mosseri if it was actually “a mental health fire.”
Mosseri said he thinks Lanier is asking if mental heath is more important than PR, and he agrees it is.
The employee also said, “We’re talking about actively encouraging young girls into body dysmorphia.” Lanier emphasized Instagram banned plastic surgery filters for a couple months, then rescinded it when “you decided that it was hurting your business.” He noted the discussion was around the time of plaintiff Kaley G.M.’s 14th birthday.
Mosseri said in the email chain that he was “more focused on the effects than the stakeholders but appreciate that both are important.”
Mosseri said he meant “the effects on people’s wellbeing.” “There’s always a trade off between safety and speech,” Mosseri said. “We’re trying to be as safe but also censor as little as possible.”
Lanier said Instagram “reversed” the ban, but Mosseri said they “evolved our policy.”
Lanier pointed out that now-former Instagram employee Nick Clegg said reversing the ban would be unwise because“we would rightly be accused of putting growth over responsibility.”
“Reputationally, it would be a very regressive step indeed. We’ll be heavily attached, both in the press and by interest groups concerned about the wellbeing of adolescents, especially teenage girls,” Clegg wrote.
At that point, Lanier said: Instagram had two choices: continue the ban until they have more data, or lift the ban. One employee listed a con of lifting the ban at the risk to wellbeing, but Mosseri still said then that he wanted to lift it.
Mosseri testified on Wednesday that they still didn’t allow the filters to be recommended to users.
Lanier highlighted an email in which an employee said she disagreed with the decision and said she knows that as the other of two teen girls, “the pressure on them and their peers coming through social media is intense with respect to body image.”
After the lunch recess, Lanier questioned Mosseri about employee Kyle Andrews saying that a survey asked about emotional impact “but I was told I need to delete that data. We can’t analyze it. We’re not allowed to ask about emotion in surveys anymore.”
Mosseri testified on Wednesday, “you definitely are allowed to ask about emotions.”
“I don’t know if we analyzed it or not, but I think he’s mistaken about deleting the data,” Mosseri said.
Lanier also questioned Mosseri about a report he released the day before he testified to Congress in 2021 about Instagram’s safety measures, and it cited research that said it’s unclear how “digital nudges” about content “might be designed to combat social media addiction.”
The research said “210 million people are suffering from social media addiction.” It also said, “The design of social media platforms is intentionally engineered to be addictive and exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology.”
“Do you really agree with that?” Lanier asked.
“No, I don’t,” Mosseri answered.
‘figure out the right balance’
In cross, Mosseri told Phyllis A. Jones of Covington & Burling LLP that he’s stayed with Facebook, now Meta, for nearly 18 years because the company “seems like a major opportunity to make people’s lives better on a daily basis.”
Mosseri, a New York native and New York University graduate, said he started working for Facebook in 2008 and eventually moved “out west.” He said the company employs people “who I feel like I learn from on a daily basis.”
He said Instagram “makes less money from teens” than any other demographic because teens “don’t click on ads very much” and don’t spend as much.
He said he disagrees with the idea that Instagram chooses profit over safety.
“I disagree with that premise. I really don’t think it’s good for the business over the long run, to do anything” that harms people, he said.
Jones asked Mosseri if he’s made decisions that prioritize wellbeing over growth, and he answered “yes.”
“We’re always trying to figure out the right balance,” he testified.
Jones displayed an email exchange in which Mosseri updated Zuckerberg on personnel shifts at Instagram, telling him he’d moved people off the growth team to fund other projects, including, he testified, “wellbeing.”
Jones also went over with Mosseri the current police on filters, which prohibits “effects that change people’s facial structure in a way that must be achieved by plastic surgery” and Instagrams efforts to identify third-party filters that violate the policy.
She addressed Lanier’s questions about Instagram’s own report citing research on addictiveness by asking Mosseri about its specific findings.
Does the study “establish anything with respect to whether young people are addicted or not to Instagram?” Jones asked.
“No,” Mosseri answered. He said the survey was intended to see if people are spending more time on Instagram than they’re comfortable.
Mosseri said he’s “always trying to think about the long term,” which includes “evolving our safety tools to address new risks as the world changes.”
Jones spent much of her exam questioning Mosseri about features such allowing parents “to see how much time that their children were spending on Instagram and set a bunch of boundaries.” Jones displayed an Instagram internal example page on the courtroom overhead as Mosseri discussed different features.
In re-direct, Lanier addressed Mosseri’s testimony about moving employees from grown to wellbeing by questioning him, “Do you recall anyone being upset because you weren’t taking care of wellbeing the way you should?”
There’s always criticism,” Mosseri said. He said an email exchange between employees shows, “They clearly think I could do a better job. That’s fair.”
Lanier asked if he sees that Instagram still does harm despite “grand aspirations.”
Mosseri said he’s “always looking for room to improve.”
Lanier cited studies about teens who use Instagram 10 or more hours a week being more likely to be unhappy, and Mosseri said it could be an example of “selection bias.”
“it could be that people who are less happy are more likely to use social media,” Mosseri said.
Lanier asked if Instagram has ever warned parents of its risk.
“We have done a lot to help parents and educators and counselors and teachers get materials to understand about the risks of social media,” Mosseri testified.
I’ll have another article next week after Zuckerberg testifies that will include details from Lembke’s testimony.
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