Mark Zuckerberg Faces Grieving Parents as L.A. Social-Media Addiction Trial Begins

CNN and Axios contributed to this report.

Mark Zuckerberg heads back to court Wednesday — and this time it’s personal. Families who blame Instagram and YouTube for tearing apart their kids are packing the Los Angeles courtroom to hear the Meta chief answer tough questions about what his platforms did — and didn’t — do to protect young users.

One of them is Joann Bogard, who sat through a Capitol Hill hearing two years ago as Zuckerberg apologized to parents holding photos of children they say were lost because of online harms. Bogard still carries a picture of her son, Mason, who died after trying a dangerous “choking challenge” she says he found on YouTube.

“I thought seeing all those pictures would change things,” she says now. “But it’s just getting worse.”

This case — brought by a plaintiff identified as Kaley and her mother — says Instagram and YouTube deliberately designed addictive features that hooked a child and wrecked her mental health. Kaley’s lawyers argue the platforms targeted kids, kept them scrolling for hours, and contributed to anxiety, body-image issues, bullying and even sextortion. If the jury buys it, the ruling could open the door for hundreds — maybe thousands — of similar lawsuits and force big changes in how social apps are built.

Meta insists otherwise. A company spokesperson says it “strongly disagrees” with the claims and that the evidence will show the firm has worked for years to support young people. After earlier public pressure, Meta added things like “teen accounts,” default privacy settings and content limits for under-18s. But plaintiffs and advocates argue those tools leave too much of the safety burden on parents and kids themselves.

Instagram’s boss showed up in court last week: Adam Mosseri testified that social platforms aren’t “clinically addictive” even as internal documents paint a different picture. Discovery materials cited by researchers show Meta tracked how valuable “tweens” are and that few teens had actually enabled parental controls — details that feed the argument these companies knew what they were building and who they were building it for.

Expect Zuckerberg’s testimony to focus on whether Meta’s actions were “reasonable”—the legal yardstick judges and juries use. Lawyers say he’ll likely talk about product changes, safety teams and how parenting matters. Opponents will press him on internal memos and the company’s choices: did profit and engagement win out over kid safety?

There’s more at play than one lawsuit. The company is also facing a separate trial in New Mexico accusing it of creating fertile ground for predators, and school districts are suing over costs tied to students’ online harms — a strategy critics compare to the tobacco litigation that reshaped an industry decades ago.

Experts called to the stand are already flagging worrying results from inside Meta. Security researcher Damon McCoy testified about internal red-teaming that showed a chatbot product failed to protect minors a large percentage of the time. That kind of testing — and what a company does after seeing the results — is now central to jurors’ questions about corporate responsibility.

Families like those of Julianna Arnold, whose daughter Coco died after contact with someone she met on Instagram, aren’t just seeking payouts. They want accountability and rules.

“We want the executives in the hot seat and to hear the truth,” Arnold says.

For parents who have lost children, the trial is a moment to force public answers from a private industry that’s had huge influence over kids’ lives for years.

Whatever the outcome, the case is likely to reshape the debate about platform design, teen safety and who pays when the system breaks. For Zuckerberg, it’s a high-stakes appearance: one that could change how tech companies balance engagement and safety — or prove that the courts aren’t the place to police product choices. Either way, grieving families are watching closely.