Lauren Feiner

At their core, these trials were about the design decisions that social media companies make, how users are going to interact with.

what comes across their feeds.

It was really trying to get around a problem that has been going on with tech for a long time around, can you separate design from content on these platforms?

That's what these trials were trying to get at.

And what came out at trial in the courtrooms were a lot of internal documents from these companies.

In the LA case, it was Meta and YouTube.

And in New Mexico, it was just Meta.

And we saw lots of internal documents, lots of former Meta employees turned whistleblowers take the stand to discuss the decisions they made and the things they saw.

So that was a lot of what we saw in the courtroom.

And in L.A., we even saw the head of Instagram, Adam Masseri, and the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, take the stand.

It was really hard to know, like, why were these jurors selected?

Were they selected because they're the sort of people who don't use social media a lot or know about a lot of good experiences with social media?

So I think that was the wild card in watching them was how are they really taking in this evidence?

At the same time, it can be hard to hear some of this evidence.

And anyone who knows someone who's been through a mental health issue or has struggled with just using their phone too much or being on social media too much

I think a lot of us know people like that.

If we're not those people ourselves, that's definitely going to affect them in some way on a human level.

I mean, when I was watching Mark Zuckerberg on the stand, he was talking about a certain beauty filter that they had and one of his own employees pushed back on including it and

you know, talked about, I believe, having daughters and, you know, thinking about how something like this would affect them.

Maybe these people don't have as much experience with social media or don't have the exact same experiences that this plaintiff had, but they certainly know other people in their lives who've probably experienced something similar.