Juries in Los Angeles and New Mexico will have to parse two very different views of Meta Platforms that they have heard during the first three weeks of parallel social media trials. Is the culture of “move fast and break things” from Meta Platforms' early days now an extinct relic within a mature company that values its users, as described by senior executives like Mark Zuckerberg? Or, as former Meta workers have testified in both trials, does that culture and its disregard for users still lie at the heart of Meta’s aggressive and reckless culture a decade and a half later?
Facebook’s upstart “move fast and break things” ethos took on new meaning as the renamed Meta Platforms bulked up into a social media powerhouse attempting to crush competition by innovating at breakneck speed, jurors in New Mexico and Los Angeles heard from former employees in recent days.But the disregard for users embedded in that slogan never really changed, the former employees testified in parallel trials against the company.
Jurors heard the company's narrative when senior executives Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri took the witness stand in Los Angeles. “Move fast and break things” was a long-ago relic of a new startup, replaced by the decidedly less sexy but more corporate "move fast with stable infrastructure,” which Zuckerberg explained “worked better.”
“A lot has been made of that phrase that tries to read more into it than intended,” Zuckerberg testified in Los Angeles when asked by a Meta lawyer to explain what “move fast and break things” meant.
Zuckerberg cast the slogan as a mantra meant to keep engineers from getting bogged down in minor bugs.
Mosseri, chief of Instagram, told jurors that Meta has become a mature company that thoroughly tests products for safety and privacy before releasing them to its more than 3 billion users.
“If you’re thinking long term, not just this week or this quarter, it’s hard to think of any instance where prioritizing safety isn’t good for revenue,” he said.
Their narrative was challenged by former Meta executives like Brian Boland, who testified in both the Los Angeles and New Mexico trials that as Facebook and then Meta faced generations of competitors — from MySpace and Google+ to Snapchat and TikTok — Zuckerberg’s company always evidenced the same ruthless, revenue-driven push to release new products before they were properly tested.
One example was Facebook Live, which was introduced in 2016, Boland testified in the trials. Facebook Live offered the then-groundbreaking ability to broadcast to the platform live from a phone. Facebook released the product “without really vetting and creating the safety protocols that I think you'd like to create before you ship a product that has instant, live access to video,” Boland said.
Soon, he said, Facebook Live was being used to broadcast suicides and other disturbing content.
“It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable at first and then extremely concerned following example after example of decisions that were made that were not in the best interests of the people who use Instagram and Facebook,” Boland told the jury.
Ultimately, in rendering their verdict in both trials, the two juries will decide which version of Meta is closest to the truth. They will have to decide if “move fast and break things” is an extinct relic of a sober, mature company that values users first as good for business, or if the same relentless drive for profit Boland described still lies at the heart of Meta’s culture a decade and a half later.
— The bosses —
“Move fast and break things” has come to symbolize the hard-charging, fast-and-loose impulses of the tech industry, particularly Meta, where it originated at an early company all-hands and quickly became a cultural ethos.
Testifying in Los Angeles on Feb. 18 (see here), Zuckerberg said he still doesn’t understand how the phrase took on such an outsized meaning. Both YouTube and Meta are defendants in the Los Angeles trial, which is focused on the specific question of whether the companies negligently designed their platforms to be addictive, despite the harm to young users such as the plaintiff, K.G.M.
“The basic point is that the tech industry is very fast moving and dynamic, and innovating quickly is important. A lot of companies make the mistake that they're too slow in improving their code where they're not delivering their services as fast. Even if they made technical errors, I wanted them to try to innovate quickly and if there were errors, we could fix it and clean it up and get to a better quality of service faster,” Zuckerberg said.
That soon stopped working as a strategy. By 2014, the Meta CEO said he realized that if engineers made too many technical errors, it would cause even more bottlenecks. So they decided to change the motto to "move fast with stable infrastructure.”
During his testimony, Zuckerberg frequently accused plaintiff lawyer Mark Lanier of mischaracterizing his statements, including a 2015 email where Zuckerberg had stated a three-year goal of increasing time users spend on the platforms by 12 percent. “Early on in the company we had goals around this, but I decided I didn't want goals for teams around time and we focused on utility and value instead,” Zuckerberg explained.
Mosseri was also confronted on the witness stand with internal documents from 2019 and 2020, when he, Zuckerberg and other senior Meta executives were trying to decide whether to ban the use of cosmetic “beauty” filters on Instagram (see here).
Filters were pioneered by Snapchat in 2015, but four years later as Instagram tried to keep up, Mosseri and Zuckerberg were confronted with more than a dozen mental health experts who said the unchecked use of filters could cause mental health issues such as body dysmorphia, particularly for young women.
Testifying on the third day of the Los Angeles trial, Mosseri said Meta doesn’t target teens as a demographic.
“We make less money from teens than from any other demographic on the app,” he said of Instagram, and Meta would not launch a significant design change without testing the impacts of the change on young users.
Ultimately, Meta decided to not recommend filters that could mimic plastic surgery. Lanier asked whether Meta had studied that, before removing its ban on filters that could appear to change the shape of people’s faces or lips through plastic surgery. “That was never done, was it?” Lanier asked.
“The decision was to turn all of [the filters] off," Mosseri said. Then the ones that didn't mimic plastic surgery were turned back on.
— The accusers —
Joining Facebook in 2009, Boland described the “move fast and break things” slogan as omnipresent, displayed in red print on posters throughout the office. At work stations, employees were confronted with a printout that said, “What will you break today?”
“The idea of move fast and break things was something that was held dear, that you should just move quickly to build things, and you should move quickly to create new products and new ideas, and you should move quickly to ship them out to the world. And if something breaks along the way, that's kind of the part of innovation — that's the cost of doing business,” Boland testified in New Mexico.
Boland saw an intense drive to beat the competition early on in his days at Facebook, as the seven-year-old company took on Google’s attempt to create a rival social network, Google+, in 2011.
“Early on, there was a threat that Google would be creating a competitor to Facebook. And so at the time, we didn't know that Facebook would be as successful as it was, and so it was concerned there would be competition” from Google+, Boland said.
Zuckerberg and other executives “gave an impassioned speech about the importance of fighting off this threat — like, how do we make sure everyone is focused day-in and day-out on building and improving the product, so that if Google came to build a product, we would beat them?” Boland said.
In the race to compete, Zuckerberg imposed a “lockdown” forcing workers to focus on competing with Google+. He put a giant clock on the wall above his office that had a countdown to the end of lockdown, pushing people to “do everything you can to beat this threat of Google,” the former executive said.
The “move fast and break things” slogan that once plastered the walls of Facebook offices faded, though the slogan was still posted in some Facebook offices around the world as late as 2017. But Boland and other former Meta employees testified that the pattern of a focus on new features to beat out the competition — as competitors like Snapchat introduced cosmetic filters in 2015 and TikTok attracted hundreds of millions of followers with its short videos in 2019 — continued as Meta built itself into a mobile-first platform and developed its own groundbreaking social media products, such as Facebook Live, Boland said.
Arturo Bejar, the former director of engineering for Meta Platforms, testified in New Mexico that back in 2012, prior to Facebook buying Instagram, Facebook had a very proactive child-safety team, and that was a selling point that ultimately persuaded Instagram’s founders to sell the company.
But when Bejar rejoined Meta in 2019 after taking a four-year break from the company, he testified, he found a “fundamentally different” culture around helping children than during the company’s earlier days as the company confronted the competitive threat of TikTok and Snapchat.
“There was a lot of research being done that wasn't getting acted on, relating to changing the products around harm,” Bejar said.
Another former Meta employee who testified in New Mexico, safety researcher Alison Lee, testified that around 2020, TikTok’s popularity spooked Meta, “the same way that Instagram took over Facebook's market share.” Meta’s answer to TikTok was Reels, launched during the Covid pandemic in the summer of 2020, a feature on Instagram and Facebook that included an “infinite scroll” video feed.
“There was a sense of feeling in 2021 that, oh my gosh, TikTok might do that to us... We've got to stand up Reels, we've got to make it as competitive and as exciting of a product as TikTok was." said Lee, who was one of the first researchers brought on to work on the safety on the product.
In order to get more people to use Reels, the company “tried to inject as many as Reels as possible” on Instagram, including a user’s feed and the Explore page.
But safety measures to keep out problematic content didn’t keep up, she said. “A lot of times we're missing huge swaths of problematic content because our labeling guidelines, our policy guidelines, were not effective for that type of content,” Lee said.
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