[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage ...
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at
California trial
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 142 points
Date : 2026-02-19 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| davidee wrote:
| https://archive.is/20260218225234/https://www.wsj.com/us-new...
| hinkley wrote:
| > In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta's growth targets
| reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them,
| and that the company doesn't seek to attract children as users.
|
| That's a perjury.
|
| I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not
| the user.
|
| Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B
| testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but
| wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made
| android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near
| collapse of civilization, which I don't think any of us would
| have predicted.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > which I don't think any of us would have predicted.
|
| Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by
| almost everyone, though, as an analogy?
| hdgs76 wrote:
| Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for
| decades using the language of rationality, math and science.
| Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook
| answer is its mathematically inefficient.
| Psillisp wrote:
| Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on
| humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the
| ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India
| Company but the screws persist.
| Gormo wrote:
| But "capitalism" doesn't actually exist as such -- it's
| just a concept that represents patterns of human behavior
| that stem from human beings' pre-existing motivations
| inclinations.
|
| Treating descriptive models as the causal factors behind
| the things they're describing is a reification fallacy.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large
| chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization,
| which I don't think any of us would have predicted.
|
| I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg
| or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
| klik99 wrote:
| I and others (but not as many as I would have thought)
| recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a
| fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I
| predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong -
| really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
|
| I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but
| not how it'd play out. It's very easy to see it in hindsight
| and even recognize it's bad, I don't think anyone saw how bad
| it would get. I just hope we don't lose the ideals of free
| speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating
| platforms.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Which part is perjury? Can you _prove_ that Mark Zuckerberg
| doesn't think his apps deliver something useful to the users?
| As far as the attracting kids part, well, that's the entire
| premise of the trial, no?
| fusslo wrote:
| The whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
|
| They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting
| questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince
| me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a
| reasonable empathetic person.
| reactordev wrote:
| That's exactly the lens they were hoping for
| fusslo wrote:
| I guess so, I expected a little more nuance to hide it
| better. but it was just blatant. like any child could figure
| it out
| Tostino wrote:
| Plenty of adults don't catch it either. You don't need to
| be blatant. Dress it up in neutral business language, keep
| the arguments one step removed from the conclusion, and
| anchor it in assumptions people already hold about markets
| and American institutions. Then it's nearly impossible to
| push back on without sounding like you're attacking the
| premises.
| reactordev wrote:
| The journalistic version of the "I'm kidnapped" hand
| signal.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| That's what the WSJ is there for
| soperj wrote:
| That's what Meta paid for.
| hisfraudulency wrote:
| There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media,
| everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and
| more time on social media apps.
|
| Wat mean?
| fullshark wrote:
| It means it's addictive
| al_borland wrote:
| When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy
| to quit.
|
| There are things I am likely addicted to that I don't like. I
| wish I didn't do them and could stop, but I don't have
| contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even
| tell my own mother I won't join when she tells me it would
| make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
| Gormo wrote:
| Alternatively, it may mean that people are largely
| hypocritical, and evaluate themselves and other people by
| different standards.
| expedition32 wrote:
| I have observed people who objectively were destroying their
| lives and yet they themselves were happily in denial.
|
| The cliched and sadly true "I am in control I can stop
| everything is fine".
|
| Humans are strange.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with
| "tobacco"
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Have you ever tried quitting smoking?
| dtj1123 wrote:
| Easy. I've done it five times in the last three years
| alone.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I don't think this is what quitting means, or was that
| part of the joke?
| Gormo wrote:
| That seems like a bizarre comparison. Is TikTok high in
| nicotine?
| justapassenger wrote:
| 1. Because people like it. 2. "Social media" is not the right
| term to describe those apps anymore. There's nothing social
| about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social
| media aren't that different from forums - places where you can
| interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy
| way).
| halestock wrote:
| Some alternative reporting:
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-social...
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mark-zucke...
| latchkey wrote:
| @dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in
| the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Oh wow they're really holding him to account by asking some
| interesting questions then letting him get back to it.
|
| /s
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Agreed - such useless pageantry. At least with meat, 'grilling'
| changes it.
| readams wrote:
| The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point.
| Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to
| make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting
| them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?
|
| Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining?
| Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become
| addicted.
| scottious wrote:
| this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
|
| Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need
| very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots
| of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't
| take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable
| restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
|
| Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm
| is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't
| study it and figure it out.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Oddly the countries that don't do this have far better
| outcomes.
|
| Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am,
| oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve
| immediately into chaos.
|
| What if the government wasn't meant to be a strange parent
| that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside
| was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the
| happiest country on earth.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| > Oddly the countries that don't do this have far better
| outcomes
|
| Go on
| dlev_pika wrote:
| For example, smoking tobacco in Japan... wait a minute
| _3u10 wrote:
| https://news.gallup.com/interactives/248240/global-
| emotions....
| refulgentis wrote:
| > Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2
| am, oh the humanity.
|
| Where do you live that this is not possible?
|
| (I know you're speaking loosely, I.e. you mean "where I
| live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am" but it's so
| loose that there's 0 argument made here, figured I'd touch
| on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the
| others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn't about you it's about
| neighborhoods with bars)
| mulmen wrote:
| It's illegal to drink in public in Washington state [1].
| I believe this is the case in most places in the United
| States. Las Vegas is a notable exception.
|
| [1]:
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=66.44.100
| refulgentis wrote:
| Can't tell if you're being earnest or pedantic (if
| earnest, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood than HN so
| maybe I'm just more familiar with the solution. The Wire
| has a scene that'll explain it better than I:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ)
| techblueberry wrote:
| The person who said smoking and hard drugs, and you said a
| beer outside after 2am. Those aren't the same thing!
| Gormo wrote:
| > this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope
| fallacy.
|
| The slippery slope fallacy is purely a _logical_ fallacy,
| meaning that it 's fallacious to argue that any movement in
| one direction _logically entails_ further movements in the
| same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope _empirically
| exists_ -- i.e. that observable forces in the world _are_
| affecting things such that movement in one direction does
| manifestly make further movement in that direction more
| likely -- is absolutely _not_ an instance of the slippery
| slope fallacy.
|
| A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear:
| if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at
| the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put
| in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement
| apparatus for a novel state intervention then you _are_
| making further interventions in that direction more likely.
| This is especially true in a political climate where
| factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme
| forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political
| slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is
| not a fallacy to point them out.
|
| > Whether or not social media does produce that measurable
| harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we
| can't study it and figure it out.
|
| It's true that the fact that it isn't _your_ area of
| expertise doesn 't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
|
| Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and
| figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative
| question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there
| is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one --
| the more distant we get from evaluating physical,
| quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the
| intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
|
| And where there _is_ agreement in modern American society, it
| tends in the opposite direction of what you 're implying
| here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would
| _not_ consider mere exposure to information or non-physical
| social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at
| least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive
| intervention.
| scottious wrote:
| okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar
| (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish
| a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive
| properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of
| addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some
| people may become addicted")..
|
| > apart from very narrow categories, most people would not
| consider mere exposure to information or non-physical
| social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
|
| That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social
| media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-
| scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep
| eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority
| for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
| kjksf wrote:
| As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious
| nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a
| cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.
|
| (I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue
| anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are
| winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were
| won).
|
| If you could, that would be the end of those businesses.
| The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic
| could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be
| no winemakers left.
|
| In that context it seems patently absurd that you could
| sue Facebook for making you addicted.
|
| It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible
| without first making such laws for alcohol and
| cigarettes.
|
| It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is
| leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in
| populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we
| discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to
| fix easily fixable problems for which we already have
| laws making them illegal.
| shakna wrote:
| Those companies are required to publicise the addictive
| nature of their products, and required to advertise
| services to aid those addicted.
|
| Facebook consistently argues they are not a source of
| harm, and do none of that.
|
| If the consumer isn't proactively being informed, then
| no, litigation isn't patently absurd.
|
| "Informed consent" is what you're missing, here.
| kjksf wrote:
| Since we're being condescending here: what you're missing
| is absence of laws making a given activity illegal.
|
| As far as I know there's no law that you could use to
| claim that Facebook did something illegal based on some
| notion of making addictive products.
|
| Just like there are no laws you could use to claim a
| winemaker did something illegal based on some notion of
| making addictive products.
|
| And I think it would be absurd to make what Facebook does
| illegal before we make what winemaker does illegal.
|
| And we tried with winemakers. Educate yourself on dark
| times of Prohibition. (you opened the condescension
| doors).
|
| > Those companies are required to publicise the addictive
| nature of their products, and required to advertise
| services to aid those addicted
|
| I've never seen such advertising so I suspect you pulled
| that factoid out of your ass. Easy for you to correct me:
| laws have numbers, cite one.
|
| If there is such law for say, alcohol, I wouldn't be
| opposed to such requirements for Facebook.
|
| I mean, it obviously would end up as ineffective
| annoyance that doesn't deter or fix anything, like cookie
| banners, but have at it.
|
| So yeah, it's still patently absurd to sue Facebook
| claiming addiction.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > calls parent condescending
|
| > "educate yourself on dark times of Prohibition"
| Gormo wrote:
| > okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something
| similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to
| establish a continuum of things that have a variety of
| addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole
| idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game
| fun, or some people may become addicted")..
|
| But he actually is correct. Use the same term to describe
| the effects of ingesting biologically active chemicals
| and the effects of emotionally engaging activity -- which
| in this case mostly consists of exposure to information
| -- absolutely _is_ disingenuous equivocation. People in
| this very thread are comparing Instagram with ingestion
| of alcohol or tobacco products, and that absolutely is a
| prevarication.
|
| It's not unreasonable to observe the course of these
| debates, and suspect that the people invoking the
| language of addiction are doing so as a pretext for
| treating what is actually a _cultural_ issue instead as a
| medical one, so as to falsely appeal to empirical
| certainty to answer questions that actually demand
| normative debate.
| n4r9 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia
|
| > Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug
| or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate
| psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other
| negative consequences
|
| Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and
| shares
|
| Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low
| self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family,
| etc...
|
| Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological
| reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is
| people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope
| with or avoid difficult feelings.
| blackoil wrote:
| High sugar food is addictive as you don't feel full fast
| enough consuming empty calories.
| fullshark wrote:
| There's people with unhealthy relationships with both food and
| video games and I'm comfortable saying they suffer from
| addiction.
| readams wrote:
| So then do you punish the chefs for making their food too
| appealing?
| saxelsen wrote:
| If the monopolist chef is deliberately adding addictive
| ingredients that causes health problems, I think, yes,
| they're the ones to punish or address the problem with.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Facebook does not have a monopoly on social media. (He
| says, writing on a competing social media site.)
|
| > addictive ingredients that causes health problems
|
| Like sugar? Are we going to make candy illegal now?
| Through the court system, retroactively, with no
| legislative mandate?
| blackoil wrote:
| We may requires, high sugar food to be labeled like
| cigarettes, maximum portion size available (largest drink
| can be 500ml), put more tax on it, advertise against it,
| ban in schools, ban advertisements in children
| program/movies.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The law takes intent into consideration, candy makers are
| not intending to make someone addicted to their product.
| This lawsuit is showing the intent behind certain user
| experience features was to addict users, not just make it
| a sweet and nice place to be.
| techblueberry wrote:
| Yes
| overgard wrote:
| Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of
| healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give
| someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there
| because they were eating _great_ food. They were eating a lot
| of bad food that doesn 't fire satiety signals in their head.
|
| Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something
| can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working
| to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not
| leaving it up to you.
|
| Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with
| explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Good things there are entire fields of medical experts
| working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're
| not leaving it up to you.
|
| No, that doesn't work. Harm is a normative concept, not an
| empirical one, so there's no role for "expertise" to play in
| defining it. Medical experts can describe mechanisms of
| causality, and their associated effects, but deciding whether
| those effects constitute harm is something that actually _is_
| up to each individual to decide, since it is an inherently
| subjective evaluation.
|
| > Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies
| with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the
| app.
|
| Yes, and attesting one thing while doing another is certainly
| something they can be held accountable for -- perhaps even
| legally, in some cases. But this attempt at treating social
| media as equivalent to physically addictive chemicals is pure
| equivocation, and making claims like this actually undercuts
| the credibility of otherwise valid critiques of social media.
|
| At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a
| medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not
| via political intervention based on contrived pretenses.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Diluted only if one doesn't know the definition of addiction
| gensym wrote:
| Indeed. As a wise man once said:
|
| "Who is to say what's right these days, what with all our
| modern ideas and products?"
| austinjp wrote:
| Food? Some products sold as food are most certainly addictive.
|
| Video games? As just one example, Candy Crush is a vacuous
| waste of anyone's time and money, with plenty of tales of
| addiction.
|
| Books? People used to think novels were addictive and bad news:
| https://archive.is/WDDCH
| andoando wrote:
| But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with
| zero care for the users well being.
|
| I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company
| in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating
| better, how to make people more matches spending less time on
| the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the
| focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful
| features that generated money
| techblueberry wrote:
| So I think two things:
|
| 1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe
| this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just
| like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's
| having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking,
| there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking
| again, but I understand why we don't.
|
| 2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is
| immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of
| understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She
| takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other
| deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the
| calories:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYbpWcw6MfA
|
| But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more
| fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them
| what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people
| to use their products more. At some point, letting giant
| multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack
| people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free
| choice that you're trying to avoid.
|
| Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok
| for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for
| us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games
| makes a little less money on Fortnight.
|
| I think one measure should be. How much do people wish they did
| a thing less.
|
| https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...
|
| I used to watch like 6 hours of TV a day. Loved every minute of
| it. Same thing with video games. Same thing with my favorite
| restaurant, don't feel the same way about smoking or like the
| M&Ms I buy in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I can't speak for others' definition of addiction but Facebook
| has been pretty bad about artificially inflating users'
| activities. Outright fake notifications, even spamming people's
| 2FA phone numbers
| miohtama wrote:
| I am addicted to Hacker News. Who can I sue?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| These companies all hired psychologists to help design systems
| that maximize dopamine release and introduce loops that drive
| compulsive behavior.
|
| Besides, they aren't making great products and haven't for some
| time. Is anyone happy with Facebook as a product? Does anyone
| who used Instagram before it became the a shittier TikTok /
| ultimate ad medium think it's a better product today?
| refulgentis wrote:
| This was the funniest / most evil testimony I've seen, in any
| case, in a while.
|
| Couldn't find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he
| testified they don't care about increasing user engagement
| (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there's always a
| lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up
| to and including 2024.
| skizm wrote:
| > The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as
| K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged
| personal injury.
|
| I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they
| were personally injured by literally every major social media
| company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have
| been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of
| regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case
| seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap
| and TikTok have settled.
| jumboshrimp wrote:
| From a Rolling Stone article:
|
| "K.G.M.'s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case
| and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-
| injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process
| meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at
| subsequent trials."
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her
| addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and
| suicidality she experienced.
| popalchemist wrote:
| She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such
| decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in
| the face of research that opposed their goals.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| My siblings are better informed, I just wanted to say,
| settlements don't get paid unless there's a risk the plaintiff
| could win.
| senderista wrote:
| Not sure about that, don't defendants sometimes settle
| because they don't want the publicity of a trial or don't
| want their dirty laundry being aired in discovery?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I have been snickering at the term "grilled" for years now. All
| of the aggressive bullshit language being used to retell these
| accounts is nonsense: NOTHING HAPPENED. Nobody is held
| accountable, and they just got nagged at in front of class for a
| bit.
|
| If you asked me, "Hey do you want to make billions of dollars
| breaking the law, but you might have to sit in front of some
| cameras every few years and answer fake questions in front of
| people with dementia?", then I could understand someone thinking
| that's easy money.
| motbus3 wrote:
| If this is a real litigation process, I wonder what would be the
| conditions Meta will need to accept for them to let it go.
| Keekgette wrote:
| Mark Parilla haha
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Alternative source:
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/mark-zuckerberg-gr...
|
| Text-only, no Javascript, HTTPS optional:
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WBSLI...
|
| Simple HTML: { x=AA1WBSLI
| ipv4=23.11.201.94 echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
| (printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x'/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'
| printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \ |nc -vvn
| $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134' } > 1.htm
| firefox ./1.htm
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| "The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to
| invest in science research"
|
| That's an impressive amount of arrogance.
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(page generated 2026-02-19 23:01 UTC)