Instagram has pursued growing use while targeting young people, lawyers argue

Instagram tracked the amount of time users spent using its app, with industry executives reporting “the most” its app reached year-over-year. The daily use of the application grew from 40 minutes a day in 2023 to 46 minutes a day in 2026, according to documents revealed during the testimony of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a criminal trial held in Los Angeles County Superior Court in February.

Looking at time-worn metals is a key element of the lawsuit, which is one of Zuckerberg’s mainstays. needy appear before the jury.

In KGM v. Platforms et al., which is now being held in LA County’s Superior Court, the court will consider whether social media companies are responsible for the health issues of young people because of their platforms or their addictive design. Snap and TikTok settled before the trial began, but the executives of the other defendants, Meta and YouTube, are testifying as part of the trial.

The 19-year-old plaintiff in the case, who goes by the initials KGM or “Kaley,” says that the use of social media at a young age was harmful to his mental health, which led him to use technology and have thoughts, including suicidal thoughts.

Meta argues that his program is the cause of Kaley’s problems.

“The question for the jury in Los Angeles is whether Instagram caused the plaintiff’s mental health problems. The evidence shows that she suffered from many problems before using social media,” Meta spokeswoman Stephanie Otway said in an emailed statement about the case.

The lawyers of the defendants hope to prove that Meta has set goals in order to increase the time of use of Instagram, although they know that there were young children on the platform. In Zuckerberg’s testimony, he was pressed for the reason that he told Congress in 2024 that children under the age of 13 are not allowed on Instagram, while internal documents show that the company knew about 4 million children under the age of 13 on the program in 2015.

Zuckerberg pushed back during the line of questioning, saying that he had answered the question in Congress honestly in explaining the company’s policies, and that Instagram had removed the users it had acquired. He also tried to explain that the “big events” that the company pursued were not the same as the “goals” that the Instagram team was tasked to achieve.

However, some documents that the plaintiff’s legal team referred to in its testimony showed the interest that Instagram is growing among young people, and emails written by the manager of the past to the point that, “Our whole company’s goal is the whole time of youth,” and that “Mark has decided that the most important thing for the company in the first half of 2017 is young people.” Another market in December 2018 also found that 12-year-olds were the “most conservative age group” in the US, suggesting that the company was interested in the demographic.

Another email, written by Zuckerberg’s adviser Nick Clegg, who he left the company last yearHe also said that the age of Instagram was “impossible”.

Although he knows that there are young users on his platform, Instagram took no action to address existing users until August 2021, when it started asking users to enter their birthdays, the plaintiff’s lawyers argued. (Meta replied that it started asking years for registration in 2019 for new users, though.)

Although Instagram has recently released youth safety and parental controls, its focus on the youth population remains. Some of the internal documents disclosed in the testimony show that Meta’s expectation is that Instagram will become the largest destination for young people who use it every month in the US and around the world this year.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide or needs to talk, there are people who want to help. Call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

The article was edited after publication to note that this is not the first time Zuckerberg has appeared before a judge, as he has done in the past. appeared in a test focused on Meta’s VR technology.