There's a girl. We'll call her Kaley. She started using YouTube when she was 6 years old. Six. The same age kids are learning to read. By 9, she was on Instagram. And by her early teens, there were days she spent 16 straight hours on that app. Sixteen hours. More than she slept. More than school. More than any human interaction in the real world. The result? Anxiety, body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, bullying, and sextortion. All traced back, according to her lawyers, to those apps.

And now, in February 2026, the man at the center of all this, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, sat down in front of a jury in Los Angeles to testify, for the very first time in his life, before regular American citizens, about whether his platforms harmed children.