What it was like to watch grieving parents stare down Mark Zuckerberg in court

Parent advocates were determined to make their presence known to Meta’s CEO.

Around a dozen parents huddled in the dim hallway outside the courtroom in February, nervously gripping paper tickets. They were glaring at a gray tote bag held by a member of the court staff — the one who’d determine, by lottery, if they made it inside. Pinned on bags and coats, butterfly clips honored children they’d lost, deaths these parents link to their children’s experiences online. The clips were a symbolic gesture chosen to not inadvertently prejudice the jury, which would decide if social media companies could be held liable for the kinds of harms they believe their children experienced. If the number on a parent’s ticket came up, they’d win one of 15 public seats to see that jury with their own eyes. Perhaps more importantly, they’d see the man many of them blame for their children’s deaths: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was set to testify that day.

The crowd waiting for those few coveted wooden seats included mothers like Mary Rodee and Lori Schott, just two of numerous parent advocates that traveled to watch a landmark social media case whose arguments conclude today. While this particular case focuses on the allegedly addictive design of Instagram and YouTube, parents were brought there by a much wider range of issues, after their children died by suicide, choking challenges, and accidental overdoses they believe were facilitated or exacerbated by online platforms. Some parents in attendance had filed their own suits against the companies. More are scheduled to face trial later this year.

A court staffer pulled a number that matched a ticket in the crowd, and the mood turned jubilant. Over days of this ritual, the reactions were similar: One mother gasped. Another danced down the hallway to collect her badge. Several times, the crowd of parents cheered when one of their numbers was called, until the court staff told them they needed to refrain.

Then, without warning, Zuckerberg marched through the crowd. He was a floating head behind a burly entourage, his face neutral and focused. The room fell to a hush with the slow realization of who had walked by. Within seconds, he had turned the corner toward the courtroom, and everyone began to chatter again.

Rodee, whose son Riley Basford died by suicide at age 15 after she says he was targeted for sextortion over Facebook, later recalled spotting Zuckerberg thanks to his unmistakable shock of curly reddish hair. “One thing that pisses me off about him is the curly hair,” Rodee told me. “Riley’s curly hair was so fricking cute. And then I want to shave his curly hair because he doesn’t fricking deserve it.”

Over the past several weeks, a Los Angeles jury has heard arguments in a social media case brought by a now 20-year-old woman going by K.G.M., or Kaley. She testified that the allegedly addictive design of the platforms had her using social media “all day long,” eventually contributing to suicidal thoughts and body image issues.

Meta and Google are defending themselves against claims that their products were negligently designed to hook users like Kaley and led to mental health issues. They have countered that it’s in their interest to create positive experiences for users, and other circumstances in Kaley’s life drove her mental health struggles, for which their platforms offered an outlet. (Snap and TikTok were also defendants, but settled their cases before trial.) It’s the first of several “bellwether” cases that could determine how thousands of similar suits are handled, with not only money but the companies’ long-held business models at stake.

Jury deliberations are expected to begin Friday, and it’s not known how long they’ll last. They’re tasked with determining whether each company was negligent in its product designs, and if they were a proximate cause of Kaley’s mental health struggles. Should they find in Kaley’s favor, they will also deliberate on damages. While the direct outcome of a win for Kaley would be monetary, Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center who has represented her, said it’s the “raison d’être” of the broader set of cases to make it so financially burdensome on companies that they “internalize the cost of safety and make it more expensive for Meta and YouTube to continue designing and operating and profiting from dangerous products than safe products.”

Parent advocates like Rodee and Schott know that there’s no guarantee of a win against the social media companies. No matter the outcome in LA County Superior Court, they are hoping to win in the court of public opinion. Over the first days of the trial, they told their children’s stories over and over outside of the courthouse to reporters and even to the lead plaintiff attorney in the case, Mark Lanier, as he left the building. “We need the awareness. We need public pressure on our politicians to say, can we try and save all of these American children?” said Annie McGrath, whose son Griffin — or Bubba — died at age 13 after attempting a choking challenge he allegedly learned from a YouTube video.

Kaley’s success or failure hinges on convincing a jury that social media platforms can be held liable for design features, even when they’re delivering user-generated content that’s usually shielded by Section 230. If the jury concludes Meta and Google are liable for harm to Kaley, it could eventually help inform a broader settlement for over 1,500 similar cases, some filed by parents in attendance. But that’s far from a foregone conclusion. Numerous suits have alleged that social media companies designed unlawfully “defective” products. Section 230 has defeated many far before they reach the trial phase — though not all. In 2021, for instance, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Snap could be sued for adding speed filters that allegedly encouraged a young user to drive recklessly and crash, even if the filter was populated with users’ own driving speeds.

Meta and YouTube have both denied the allegations in Kaley’s case. “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in an earlier statement. The company has created a site about teen safety to rebut allegations across many of the cases. “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda said in a previous statement.

Many parents were eager to hear Zuckerberg face questioning. The Meta CEO has testified several times in Congress, but he was up against lawmakers barking strings of rapid questions, then moving on. “Now you’re in front of a jury, not congressmen and women who are also lining their pockets with money from Big Tech,” said Brandy Roberts, whose daughter Englyn died by suicide at age 14 after her parents say she emulated a video she saw on Instagram. “We know that the jurors cannot be paid off.”

Nothing Zuckerberg could say would bring their children back, but if they could keep the pressure on platforms to implement new safeguards, or teach other parents about the potential dangers their kids could experience online, they’d stand in the unseasonably cold and rainy LA weather all day.

The case has created a rare chance to expose information that the companies would rather keep under wraps. Documents displayed during Zuckerberg’s testimony, for example, showed how Meta lifted a temporary ban on certain third-party Instagram filters that could alter users’ appearances, albeit without promotion by the platform. Internal emails showed that some executives disagreed with that decision, and expressed concern that it could promote body dysmorphia among teen girls. “We were one of the families who were on top of things,” said Roberts. “We had passwords to phones, we monitored the usage and had no knowledge of things that are coming out in the internal documents in court.”

Mothers I spoke to outside the courtroom told me that the fact the trial is even happening feels like a win. “It’s such a surreal thing to think that we are at this point, we’ve been fighting for this for so long,” said Amy Neville, whose son Alexander died at 14 from fentanyl poisoning allegedly facilitated by Snapchat almost six years ago. “To have this moment that we were told could never happen, it’s a little bit overwhelming to stop and think about.”

“I keep saying things are oxymoronic,” Rodee told me, like “justice and injustice, all at the same time.”

“Riley’s never coming back. And what do I really think can happen to this guy?” she said of Zuckerberg. “So it’s just continuing to remember that this is a huge step. These documents in front of a jury is what they laughed in our face about when our kids died.”

“The doors are finally open, but your child is not there to see that we are getting somewhere”

Whether or not they got a seat inside, the parent advocates made the most of their time there to spread awareness. Before the lottery system had been implemented, parents waited outside overnight in the rain to see Instagram head Adam Mosseri, pulling all-nighters, playing cards, and swapping stories to make it to the morning. The prior week, they participated in demonstrations, including unveiling a memorial of large-scale smartphones with their children’s images, and painting the names of children allegedly harmed by Snapchat on the street in front of the company’s LA office. Roberts recalled that during a moment of silence at one of the events, it “hits you in your gut, when you realize that standing in front of the courthouse, the doors are finally open, but your child is not there to see that we are getting somewhere.”

All of the parents described a strong sense of community and shared understanding. Many of them had informal and perhaps unspoken agreements with one another about who to prioritize getting a spot in the courthouse, based on whether their own case had been filed in the same courthouse, or if their kid experienced harm on Meta’s platforms specifically. “It’s just like now everybody’s kid is my kid, especially in my grief besties,” Rodee said. “That’s another oxymoron, right? We’d all give up all these friends to have our kid back.”

There was a minor sense of satisfaction for some parents in the fact that Zuckerberg had to go through the public entrance’s metal detectors, just like everyone else. Many of the parents present had seen Zuckerberg before when he testified in the Senate in 2024. There, at the prompting of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), he turned around to apologize to them, each holding pictures of the children they had lost. A few of them later described that moment to me as “fake.”

Seeing him in court was both similar and different. “I’m sure it was a new million-dollar suit, but he looked exactly the same,” Rodee said. “He’s short,” McGrath thought.

Deb Schmill, whose daughter Becca died at age 18 due to fentanyl poisoning via drugs she allegedly purchased with the help of social media, “desperately wanted” to get into the courtroom on the day Zuckerberg testified, but her ticket wasn’t called. “I was so disappointed. I don’t cry that often. I was almost in tears that I wasn’t going to get in,” she told me outside the courthouse that morning. Still, it was hard to be in such proximity to the CEO, compared to when she was seated in the Senate committee room for his congressional testimony. “Hopefully I’ll never have to be that close to him again,” she said. “It’s just a weird thing to be seeing the person who purposely made decisions that impacted your child like this, and all these children like this.”

“It’s just like now everybody’s kid is my kid, especially in my grief besties”

Parents endured the discomfort to make sure Zuckerberg was aware of their presence. “I wanted him to look at me,” said Schott, whose daughter Annalee died by suicide at age 18 after struggling with body image issues she believes were exacerbated by being fed a steady stream of social media posts. “Usually, I’m just the one who cries, but I wanted him to look at me and to look at Mary and just know that parents are here. I hope to hell they said, ‘Oh shit, the parents are here.’”

Even harder than being at the trial, for some, was being away from it. “I couldn’t be here last week and I was not in good shape at home. You can ask my daughter. I was stomping around saying, ‘I need to be there,’” McGrath said outside the courthouse during the second week of the trial. McGrath showed me a recurring reminder that pops up on her phone every day after work to report the choking game video to YouTube. She says it typically takes her 10 minutes a day to find about 50 videos that she reports to the platform. “I don’t even think anyone ever looks at them.”

Brandy and Toney Roberts showed up to bring awareness to the kinds of harms they believe their daughter Englyn was exposed to on social media. “Being from a small town in Louisiana, we don’t want our daughter forgotten,” said Brandy. “Getting her face out there and letting the world know that it doesn’t discriminate … It doesn’t discriminate on age, it doesn’t discriminate for religion. It’s harming all of our kids. So just to put faces to actual names and for the big CEOs of these Big Tech companies to see that our children existed and they matter to us.”

Outside the courtroom the day before Zuckerberg’s testimony, Lanier, the lead plaintiff attorney, walked around a circle of mothers, holding their hands and asking each about their children and what they’d experienced. Throughout the week, several told me about their kids as well: Becca “gave the best hugs out of anyone in the world,” according to her mother, Schmill. Schott’s Annalee was “a little rural country girl that was never any trouble and loved community service and living on the farm.” Riley would hide around the corner to scare his mother, Rodee, or “have the radio cranked up when I get out to the car, dancing and singing.”

“I pray for your comfort,” Lanier, whose other profession is as a pastor, closed his eyes and said, standing in the circle of parents, holding each other’s hands and nodding vigorously. “And Lord, make our team valiant to fight for you, and to fight for justice, and to fight for the hearts and souls of so many kids who are cast off in the interest of profit.”

“I hope to hell they said, ‘Oh shit, the parents are here’”

Court had been dismissed early that day after both sides decided to put the day’s schedule on pause to see if a juror who was in the hospital that morning would recover in time to come back. The attorneys worried about a “run on the jury” — having more jurors find reasons to get out of trial — once they got to see its most high-profile witness testify the next day.

Besides the juror’s hospitalization, the trial had already been plagued by a series of unfortunate events. Jury selection was paused for several days at the beginning of the trial after Meta’s lead attorney, Paul Schmidt, sustained a concussion. Then, the entire proceeding had to move to a different building when the courthouse had water damage from a leak. The mishaps scuttled the original schedule for top executives including Zuckerberg and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who ended up not testifying at all.

On the day of Zuckerberg’s testimony, the courtroom was stuffed with lawyers, public, and press — it was hard to imagine how much smaller the room would have felt with Snap and TikTok in the mix. Lanier’s sermon-like style was on full display during his examinations. His charismatic demeanor clashed with Zuckerberg’s matter-of-fact tone, at times seeming to make the Meta CEO bristle.

Lanier breezed through a recap in his Southern drawl of Zuckerberg’s testimony from earlier that day. Despite testifying that Meta stopped setting goals to increase user time on its platforms, he said, the company still set milestones as of 2022 to increase use of its products. Zuckerberg accused him of “mischaracterizing” his testimony, saying that “milestones” served only as a “gut check” shared with senior leadership, while employees received “goals” that no longer included increasing time spent.

When questioning friendlier witnesses, Lanier peppered his questions with humanizing questions about their hobbies (former Meta advertising executive Brian Boland is an avid beekeeper, and expert witness John Chandler, an Ultimate Frisbee champ). He kept a laser focus on the jury, whose attention he was clearly eager to retain. Unlike in a bench trial, where the judge is informed on the law (and paid a salary to be there), attorneys have to ensure their message is easy enough for a layperson to follow. After the judge denied his request to change the schedule so he wouldn’t have to put on his data science expert during the afternoon doldrums, Lanier amped his energy even higher than it had already been. “For a riveting afternoon, we thought a lot of math would be in order,” he said to introduce Chandler. Lanier lavished attention on Chandler’s personal life, asking about his 5-year-old (“yes, we have a 5-year-old border collie mix,” Chandler said, to laughter), and shouting, “Mercy, I almost forgot you’re a world champion!” to let him talk about his Frisbee accomplishments.

Rather than show exhibits through the computer, Lanier presented notes and doodles with the kind of overhead projector common in elementary schools. He introduced Boland, his criticisms of Meta, and the allegedly dictatorial “Zuckerberg Mandate” he would explain by drawing a sketch of a road with three stops, an outline of the journey Boland’s testimony would take.

To defend themselves, the companies have countered that other factors in Kaley’s life impacted her mental health, and pointed out that social media addiction isn’t a clinical diagnosis. Mosseri testified that using the app for 16 hours a day was simply “problematic use.” “I’m sure I’ve said that I’ve been addicted to a Netflix show when I binged it really late one night, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as clinical addiction,” he said during another part of the testimony, according to the BBC. YouTube’s vice president of engineering, Cristos Goodrow, testified that endless scrolling by users would be a bad sign for the business, indicating its recommendation systems weren’t working as intended, NTD News reported.

During their defense cases, the companies sought to discredit any idea of a causal link between their services and Kaley’s struggles. They’ve called witnesses to testify to the offline issues Kaley was facing, and Google claimed she spent only an average of 30 minutes a day on YouTube.

Social media addiction is not an official diagnosis, though groups like the American Psychiatric Association say that “problematic and compulsive use of social media” could be addressed with cognitive behavioral therapy. Its impact is less black-and-white than the substance-based addictions the platforms are often compared to, like nicotine. Moderate social media use has actually been linked to positive outcomes for users’ well-being, and some research has found that undergoing a “digital detox” doesn’t evoke the kind of physical withdrawal symptoms found with drugs. During the trial, instead, social media compulsions have been compared to addictions to gambling, which is a behavioral addiction defined in the DSM-5.

Parents around the courthouse told me that the way their children were stuck to their phones was alarming, and that the things they encountered were difficult to detect. Schott recalls locking her daughter’s phone in the car to keep it from her. Julianna Arnold recalls her daughter, Coco — who died of fentanyl poisoning at 17 after trying to buy a Percocet from a dealer she allegedly connected with on Instagram — fighting her for the phone, “as if, if she did not have this in her hand, she would not fall asleep.”

“Parents think, ‘My kid would never do that’ … Oh yeah, they would”

Though the parents blame social media platforms for harming their kids, they also acknowledge there’s a role for parents. “Everybody says, ‘Well, it’s the parent’s responsibility.’ I’m not arguing that,” Schott said. “Of course it is, but I did everything in my power. But playing Whac-a-Mole with the phone and her hunger to be on those social media platforms were just beyond anything I’ve ever seen.” They want other parents to understand the risks, and take steps to educate themselves and their children. “Parents think, ‘My kid would never do that.’ For Griffin, ‘My kid would never choke himself,’” said McGrath. “Oh yeah, they would … The prefrontal cortex isn’t developed until they’re 25. That’s impulse control and rational thinking of, ‘I could actually die,’ that doesn’t enter their head.”

The jury may not need to parse whether kids’ behavior constitutes clinical addiction. To prevail, Kaley’s lawyers must only convince them that the products caused meaningful harm, and that Meta and Google were negligent in preventing it, or failed to warn users about the potential risks. “Addiction is one type of danger,” said Neama Rahmani, a personal injury attorney and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers who isn’t involved in the social media cases. However, it’s been a major focus here, because causation for other kinds of mental harm is much harder to prove. “Lots of people have mental health issues for all sorts of reasons,” said Rahmani. Jess Nall, an attorney at Withers uninvolved in the cases, said in a statement, “While the jury as a matter of law doesn’t need to find clinical addiction as a formal legal element, plaintiffs’ main theory in the case arguably depends on proving something close to it.”

One Meta product did pose a clear risk to the actual legal process: its camera-studded Ray-Ban glasses. After Zuckerberg’s entourage was pictured wearing what appeared to be the smart glasses, Judge Carolyn Kuhl told the courtroom that no one should be wearing them, and if they had any recordings, to delete them. Camera glasses weren’t the only issue around potential recordings in the courthouse — Kuhl removed Bergman, an attorney for Kaley, from the steering committee for the broader group of bellwether cases after he recorded an interview with the BBC from inside the courthouse, in violation of the court’s electronics policy.

As the day progressed, Zuckerberg didn’t directly acknowledge the parents at the courthouse. He seemed to make a concerted effort to look straight ahead on his way inside, and exited the witness stand unceremoniously after his long day of testimony. One or two of the parents believed they caught his eye on the way in — and that even if they didn’t, they were confident he felt their presence.

The CEO’s appearance was still toward the beginning of a long battle. This case alone has lasted five weeks, and since he testified, the jury heard from YouTube’s VP of engineering, a former Facebook employee, and Kaley herself. Once this jury finishes deliberating — whatever the outcome — the court will soon move on to the next case in the set of so-called bellwether trials.

While some people wonder why they suffer the grief to tell their stories over and over, Toney Roberts said, “we live it every day anyway. So if it’s going to help another family to not go through the situation, another child to not go through the situation, we’re hoping together that we can bond and bring awareness, as we have done across the entire world.”

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