Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg seeks to avoid personal liability in lawsuits blaming him for Instagram addiction
- Young users and parents say the billionaire was repeatedly warned that Instagram and Facebook weren’t safe for children, but he ignored the findings
- Holding Zuckerberg personally responsible may be a challenge because of a corporate law tradition of shielding executives from liability
Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to avoid being held personally liable in two dozen lawsuits accusing Meta Platforms Inc. and other social media companies of addicting children to their products.
The Meta chief executive officer made his case at a hearing on Friday in California federal court, but the judge did not immediately make a decision. A ruling in Zuckerberg’s favour would dismiss him as a personal defendant in the litigation with no impact on the allegations against Meta.
Holding him personally responsible may be a challenge because of a corporate law tradition of shielding executives from liability, especially at larger companies where decision-making is often layered.
A loss for the billionaire who launched Facebook with friends as a Harvard undergraduate two decades ago could encourage claims against other CEOs in mass personal injury litigation.
Zuckerberg faces allegations from young people and parents that he was repeatedly warned that Instagram and Facebook weren’t safe for children, but ignored the findings and chose not to share them publicly.
The cases naming Zuckerberg are a small subset of a collection of more than 1,000 suits in state and federal courts by families and public school districts against Meta along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Snap Inc. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, who is overseeing the federal cases, recently allowed some claims to proceed against the companies while dismissing others.
