Internal Meta documents have offered a rare inside look at the company’s strategy around capturing the youth market.
When former Meta Platforms executive Brian Boland described his onetime employer as a “black box” on the witness stand this week, he was asked what he meant. “You don’t know what’s happening inside of it,” he said. But over the past week, jurors weighing claims that social media was designed to be addictive have been fed a steady drip of internal Meta documents that offered a rare look inside.Emails, slide decks and internal reports shown through Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s highly anticipated testimony have begun to sketch out what the company understood about young users on Instagram, its strategic focus on teens and push to maximize engagement.
The outcome of the case may turn on whether jurors view the documents as smoking gun evidence that Meta knowingly pursued youth engagement despite the risk of addiction and harm to kids’ mental health.
One internal document from 2018 said the company could estimate that in 2015, there were 4 million people under age 13 on Instagram, a figure that represents 30 percent of all 10-12-year-olds in the US.
Confronted with the document on the stand, Zuckerberg said, “I am not sure about the document. But I generally think that there are a set of people, potentially a meaningful number of people, who potentially lie about their age in order to use our services.”
Another 2019 email from a Meta employee titled “challenges to be solved” said “our lack of proactive action on detecting under 13 accounts undermines our credibility generally.”
Other documents pointed to the company’s interest in attracting younger users. Among them, a 2017 PowerPoint prepared for Meta by an outside firm titled "Creating the Future: Identifying Opportunity Spaces in the Digital Market” and featuring an adolescent boy in an Abercrombie T-shirt jumping in the air.
It read: “Objective: to unearth digital behavior of 8-12s and explore fertile areas of opportunity for app/digital development, with the goal of creating opportunity areas that ignite Facebook creativity.”
On seeing this document, Zuckerberg said, “To be clear, this is something that someone outside of Meta produced and is just attached in an email I didn't receive. I don't see how it's relevant.”
Zuckerberg testified this week (see here), and back in 2021 before Congress, that Instagram does not allow kids under 13 to be on Instagram, nor does he give his employees goals around increasing the amount of time people spend on there.
He said his mindset around company goals changed over time to focus on utility and value. “There is a basic assumption I have that if something is valuable, then people will do it more because it's useful for them. That's different than having a goal for teams to encourage people to spend more time.”
“And they will use it more if it is addictive too?” asked Mark Lanier, lead counsel for a young woman who claims she was addicted to Instagram and YouTube (see here).
“I’m not sure what to say to that,” Zuckerberg replied. "I'm trying to build a service here. In my experience, if you do something that's not good for people, maybe they will spend more time in the short term, but if they're not happy with it they won't use it more over time.”
He said he’s more focused on the long term, adding, “I’m not trying to maximize the amount of time people spend this month or something like that.”
Lanier showed Zuckerberg a 2015 email indicating that he was at least somewhat concerned about the shorter term. Entitled “company goals,” it listed “time spent increases by 12%” as something he would like to see accomplished over the next three years.
“Sir, you are the decision maker for the entire company,” Lanier said. “Don’t you think if you got an email that says you want time to go up by 12%, you don't think people might interpret that as a goal for the company?”
Zuckerberg replied, “What I wrote here is what I hope we accomplish. I don't know how that got distilled into formal company goals.”
Zuckerberg also said he wasn’t aware that Meta’s algorithms were driving an increase in the time that teens spent on their platforms. Lanier showed him an email between two user-experience researchers where one said, “Basically the company position is the time spent and engagement metrics proxy user value and we are not just tuning the algorithm to keep people scrolling as much and as long as possible.” Except, “mechanically we absolutely do” through a “guided value model” that systematically adjusts the algorithm to increase sessions and views. “So the model is absolutely tuned to maximize engagement in a maximally empirical, principle-less way,” the employee wrote.
The other employee replied that he didn’t think Meta’s youth team realized that the GVM process also applies to teens.
Zuckerberg said he disagreed with that characterization.
“But that's Meta's characterization,” Lanier said.
“I disagree,” Zuckerberg responded. “That's two people who work at the company.” He called it “an oversimplified and not accurate description of how this works.”
The jury also saw an email from Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who testified last week (see here).
It was his personal review from 2022. He said his “primary goal was to ensure that the app remains culturally relevant as measurement by sessions, time and sharing, particularly with teens."
He goes on to say, “Reels have driven time to all time highs at 41.9 minutes per daily active user globally, 37.4 minutes in the US. Sessions are up X% globally and roughly flat year on year in the US. My stretch goal was to get on track to pass TikTok in terms of time spent worldwide by doubling our market share relative to theirs.”
Zuckerberg dismissed this as routine benchmarking.
"We try to increase the value of services but we're also trying to measure our value against our competitors like TikTok. Measuring the time people spend on the app is the best proxy for how we're doing compared to TikTok,” he said. “That’s different than giving our own team a goal of trying to increase time spent. This is more to measure how things are stacking up in the industry.”
Another email from 2022 outlined “milestones” for Instagram's future. It listed growing teen use in the US globally by 42 minutes per day as a milestone for 2024. For 2025, it listed bigger ambitions. “Instagram is the largest teen destination by [monthly active user] in the US 44 minutes per" daily active user. By 2026, Meta sought to increase this number to 46 minutes.
Zuckerberg said these weren’t formal goals, but were what Meta expected to see if it delivered enough value to users.
The document trail is expected to grow next week as more former Meta employees take the stand. Jurors peering inside the company’s “black box” will have to decide whether the materials supports Zuckerberg’s value-driven narrative or points to a more aggressive push to win over kids and teens.
Please e-mail editors@mlex.com to contact the editorial staff regarding this story, or to submit the names of lawyers and advisers.