Mark Zuckerberg defends Instagram’s beauty filters and age checks in court

Mark Zuckerberg has spent two decades explaining his company to investors, regulators, and Congress. On Wednesday, he explained it to a jury.

In a Los Angeles courtroom, the Meta $META CEO took the stand for six hours in a bellwether youth-harm case that accuses Instagram and other platforms of designing products that hooked young users and contributed to depression and suicidal thoughts. The legal theory here is that engagement is engineered. Zuckerberg’s response was that product decisions are messy, trade-offs are real, and hindsight is easy.

“These are complicated decisions, and it’s not surprising that people disagreed on them,” Zuckerberg testified, according to reporters inside the courtroom, as plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier walked jurors through internal emails and presentations. Among them: messages discussing teens as a priority and debates over whether to remove beauty filters that mimic plastic surgery results. One executive had urged a ban, warning of body dysmorphia risks.

Zuckerberg called an outright ban on the filters “overbearing,” framing the issue as one of expression and user choice. “No product is perfect, and we want to continually improve ours to get better and better over time,” he said.

Plaintiffs highlighted internal “milestones” that referenced raising average daily usage beyond 40 minutes per user. Zuckerberg pushed back on the language itself. “I’m not trying to maximize time spent in a given month or something like that,” he told the court. “If you are trying to say my testimony was not accurate, I strongly disagree with that.”

The semantic trench warfare bordered on surreal. Are “milestones” different from “goals”? Does planning for more use equal designing for addiction? The jury is being asked to decide whether those internal documents read like standard product management — or something more pointed.

On age verification, Zuckerberg acknowledged the difficulty of keeping under-13 users off the platform, arguing a “best solution” would involve phone makers sharing verified age data with app companies. He said kids under 13 “have never been allowed” on Instagram, but that “people… lie about their age,” so enforcement is “very difficult.” Responsibility, in his telling, stretches beyond Menlo Park.

There were flashes of concession from the Meta CEO. “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner,” he said, referring to safety improvements. But there were no dramatic reversals, no smoking-gun moment. The tone, as observers noted, was controlled — at times edging toward irritated — rather than shaken.

People accompanying Zuckerberg appeared to be wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. At one point, Judge Carolyn Kuhl warned them to delete any recordings or risk contempt. Even the courtroom technology became a reminder of what this trial is really about: how modern platforms shape attention, and who pays when that shaping goes wrong.

For now, Zuckerberg’s defense rests on a simple proposition that engagement isn’t evidence of harm. The jury will decide whether that distinction holds. But Wednesday was six hours of Silicon Valley’s favorite move: turn design into philosophy, turn philosophy into procedure, and hope the jury forgets what it felt like to be 13 with a phone.