Mark Zuckerberg arriving at the courthouse in Los Angeles.Image: keystone
The head of the Facebook group Meta has to face questions in court. This is also about access for minors.
02/19/2026, 07:4502/19/2026, 07:45
In a US trial about alleged social media addiction, the head of the Internet company Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted temporary deficiencies in age controls. Zuckerberg regretted on Wednesday in Los Angeles that Meta’s photo and video platform Instagram had been slow in identifying underage users in the past. Instagram requires users to be at least 13 years old.
Zuckerberg was confronted in court with an internal document that claimed Instagram had four million users under the age of 13 in 2015. In retrospect, age control has not improved at the desired pace, said Zuckerberg. “I always wished we could have done this sooner,” he told the jury. But now everything is “at the right level”.
Californian accuses networks of psychological damage
The focus of the proceedings is the case of a 20-year-old Californian woman whose name is abbreviated to Kaley GM. She accuses the operators of online networks such as Instagram and YouTube of making her addicted as a minor and thereby causing her serious psychological harm.
At the start of the civil proceedings, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, argued that Internet companies such as Meta and Google had “created an addiction in children’s brains” with social media apps. Their aim was to keep them on the platforms for as long as possible in order to increase advertising revenue. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, however, denied the app’s addictive potential.
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