CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, February 19th that he regretted Meta’s slow progress in identifying underage users on Instagram, as he faced stinging criticism at a landmark social media trial over accusations that his company deliberately got children hooked on the platform.
A 20-year-old California woman sued Meta and YouTube, accusing them of building addictive platforms that cause harm to children.
Asked to comment on complaints from inside the company that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using Instagram, the 41-year-old head of the platform’s parent company Metasaid improvements had been made, adding
I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.
Zuckerberg was the most hotly anticipated witness in the California trial, the first in a series of lawsuits filed by American families against social media platforms. The trial marked the first time the multibillionaire, whose business also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, addressed the safety of his world-dominating platforms directly before a jury and under oath.
Zuckerberg was very reserved at first, according to an AFP journalist in the courtroom. But he grew animated, showing signs of annoyance, shaking his head and waving his hands as he turned toward the jury. He also stressed his belief that Apple and Google, the companies behind operating systems powering most of the world’s smartphones, should arrange for age verification at the handset level instead of leaving it up to each app developer:
Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately…. It would be pretty easy for them.
