Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly regretted on Wednesday that Instagram was slow to effectively identify users under 13, in theory banned on the social network, during his hearing in a Los Angeles civil court.

Published on: 02/18/2026 - 04:09 Modified on: 02/18/2026 - 20:58

The manager testifies in the trial of Meta and Google, accused of having knowingly designed their respective platforms Instagram and YouTube in order to make them addictive for young Internet users, which they refute.

Instagram waited until 2019 to start asking people who wanted to create an account their date of birth, before extending this obligation to all users in 2021.

“We have added new (detection) tools over the years,” recalled the co-founder of Facebook. However, “I tell myself that we could have gotten there sooner”.

During the hearing, the plaintiff's lawyer, Mark Lanier, produced an internal document dating from 2018 which estimated, in 2015, the number of Instagram accounts belonging to children under 13 at four million.

Instagram estimated, at the time, that 30% of 10-12 year olds were on the network in the United States.

The platform now uses identification tools that help it verify a person's age, particularly based on content and their interactions.

Twelve jurors in a civil court must determine by the end of March whether YouTube (Google) and Instagram (Meta) are partly responsible for the mental health problems encountered by Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old Californian who experienced intensive consumption of social networks since childhood.

Mark Lanier recalled that the plaintiff registered on Instagram in 2015, at just 9 years old, at a time when the social network did not control age.

This is the first time that the boss of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) has spoken before a jury, under oath, on the security of its applications used by billions of human beings.

Time spent

This first case and two others similar to it, also judged in Los Angeles by the summer, were chosen to test the ways of resolving thousands of complaints accusing social networks of being responsible for an epidemic of depression, anxiety, anorexia, and even suicides among young people.

During the hearing, the plaintiff's lawyer also returned to the fact that in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg had set a goal, according to internal documents, of increasing the average time spent on Instagram by 12% over three years.

The methods used to get a young user to stay longer on a platform are at the heart of the trial, with Mark Lanier accusing Instagram and YouTube of having "manufactured addiction in children's brains".

“We had goals,” admitted Mark Zuckerberg, “but after a while I decided that our teams no longer needed to have goals for time spent (on Instagram),” he explained, “and we focused on utility and value.”

Pounded with repeated questions about these famous objectives, the billionaire forty-year-old sometimes showed signs of annoyance, sometimes shaking his head.

“If you create something that's not good for people,” Mark Zuckerberg said, “they may spend more time on it in the short term, but they won't be happy with it.”

“Internal documents show that Meta understood the dangers of its platforms for young people”, but Mark Zuckerberg and his group “went ahead anyway”, denounced, before the hearing, Matthew Bergman, founding lawyer of the Social Media Victims Law Center

Meta “strongly contests these allegations” and recalls its “long-standing commitment” to the implementation of regulatory and parental control tools.

Only the design of applications, the algorithm and the personalization functions are concerned by the debates because American law almost completely exempts platforms from liability for published content.

TikTok and Snapchat, also targeted by these complaints, preferred to sign a confidential agreement with Kaley G.M. before the trial.

The ongoing proceedings in Los Angeles are taking place in parallel with a similar proceeding carried out this time on a national scale, before a federal judge in Oakland (California), and likely to lead to another trial in 2026.

Meta is also on trial this month in New Mexico, where a prosecutor accuses the group of prioritizing profit over protecting minors from sexual predators.

© 2026 AFP

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