In February, Mark Zuckerberg sat before a ury for the first time while parents of dead children filled the gallery.
The jury found Meta liable and handed him a loss he couldn't script his way out of.
Now he's asking a federal judge for something no witness in American legal history has ever been granted – and she's deciding this week.
More than 2,400 lawsuits are stacked against Meta – filed by school districts, state attorneys general, and families whose children were harmed by Instagram and Facebook.
Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers consolidated them into multidistrict litigation – a series of bellwether trials beginning June 12 with Breathitt County School District in Kentucky going first.
Meta's lawyers filed a motion asking for something no witness in a mass tort case has ever received: Mark Zuckerberg testifies live exactly once, and every subsequent jury gets a videotape.
Plaintiffs' attorney Previn Warren, co-lead counsel for thousands of victims, called it what it is.
"Mr. Zuckerberg's power, wealth, and status should not privilege his time over that of any other witness," Warren said. "He is capable of finding his way to the courthouse and should face each plaintiff in each trial."
Meta fired back that repeated live testimony is "duplicative" and the demand is "nothing more than a PR play."
The man with a $300 million superyacht and a 2,300-acre Hawaii compound is worried about his schedule.
What the Instagram Teen Mental Health Trial Jury Actually Saw
On February 18, 2026, grieving parents filled every available seat in a Los Angeles courtroom – mothers and fathers who traveled from across the country because Instagram helped kill their children.
Plaintiff's attorney Mark Lanier had six lawyers unspool a 35-foot-wide collage of hundreds of Instagram selfies posted by a girl who started using the app at age nine – and made Zuckerberg look at them while she watched from the gallery.
Zuckerberg told the jury Meta does not seek to make Instagram addictive to younger users.
His own company's internal documents said otherwise.
A Meta employee wrote internally that "IG is a drug… we're basically pushers."
Another warned colleagues that burying their own research would look like "tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves."
The jury found Meta liable.
The Tobacco Pattern Playing Out in Real Time
In 1994, seven tobacco CEOs testified before Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive.
Internal documents contradicted them within weeks – and within two years every one of them was gone from their companies and under federal investigation for perjury.
The settlement cost the industry $206 billion.
USC mass tort professor Adam Zimmerman explained exactly why Meta's lawyers are fighting live testimony so hard.
"Bringing a CEO in front of a jury, and then cross-examining them can make them more real and take these 'giants' of tech and bring them down to size," Zimmerman said. "There's always the possibility that they say something different live as opposed to a carefully curated video."
A videotaped deposition is a controlled performance – answers rehearsed, every word approved.
Live cross-examination in front of twelve strangers from Kentucky is something else entirely.
Meta Internal Documents Show What Zuckerberg Knew About Kids on Instagram
Instagram reached your grandchildren at age nine.
Meta's own research found that 13 percent of 13 to 15-year-olds experienced unwanted sexual advances on Instagram every week.
The company knew 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram in 2015 – and Zuckerberg declared teen time spent should be Meta's "top goal of 2017" anyway.
Internal documents as recent as 2024 stated that "acquiring new teen users is mission critical to the success of Instagram."
Fordham Law professor Howard Erichson put it plainly: live CEO testimony is the "gold standard in civil cases because it allows the actual jury to see the cross-examination of the witness for themselves."
This is the same man who censored conservatives, buried the Hunter Biden story, and flooded Democrat precincts with Zuckerbucks.
Now he wants a judge to rule he's too important to face the families he helped destroy – courtroom after courtroom, across the country he spent $400 million trying to tilt.
Twelve juries staring at those internal documents while Zuckerberg explains why children’s mental health came second to his engagement numbers.
Meta doesn't survive it.
That's why his lawyers filed the motion.
Sources:
- Thomas Barrabi, "Mark Zuckerberg is trying to wiggle out of testifying in person at a slew of social media trials," New York Post, May 4, 2026.
- "Meta CEO Admits Biden-Harris Admin Pressured Company to Censor Americans," Fox Business, August 27, 2024.
- Rich Lowry, "Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Wrong to Suppress Hunter Laptop Story, Scolds White House for Covid Censorship," National Review, August 27, 2024.
- "KGM Social Media Addiction Verdict: Meta and YouTube Liable," Spencer Law, March 2026.
- "Social Media Companies Harm Young People – Here's The Evidence," Daily Wire, April 2026.
- "Meta's Unsealed Internal Documents Prove Years of Deliberate Harm," Tech Oversight Project, November 2025.
- "The Tobacco Cases," American Museum of Tort Law.
