Brian Boland testified about his transition from “deep blind faith” in Meta to becoming its public critic. He spent more than a decade trying to build a system that would bring profits to Meta. On Thursday, he told a California court that the system encouraged more and more users, including teenagers, to join Facebook and Instagram — despite the risks.
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Boland’s testimony came a day after Meta CEOMark Zuckerberg appeared in a case about whether Meta and YouTube are liable for alleged harm to a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg presented Meta’s mission as a balance between safety and free expression, not revenue. Boland’s role was to counter that, explaining how Meta makes money and how that has shaped the design of its platforms.
He testified that Zuckerberg cultivated a culture that prioritized growth and profit over user well-being. During his 11 years at Meta, Boland said he went from having “deep blind faith” in the company to having “afirm belief that competition, power, and growth were the things that mattered most to Mark Zuckerberg.”
Boland most recently served as Meta's VP of Partnerships before leaving in 2020, working to bring content to the platform that could be monetized, and previously worked in various advertising roles starting in 2009. He testified that Facebook's infamous early motto of "move fast and break things" represented "a cultural mindset at the company."
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He said the idea behind the slogan was generally, "don't really think about what could go wrong with a product, but just put it out there and learn and see."
Zuckerberg consistently made his priorities for the company clear, according to Boland. He would announce them in meetings and leave no doubt about where the company needed to focus, whether it was building its products to be mobile-first or getting ahead of the competition. When Zuckerberg realized that the then-Facebook needed to get in shape to compete with a rumored social networking rival to Google, Boland recalled a digital countdown clock in the office that symbolized how much time they had left to achieve their goals during what the company called “lockdown.”
During his tenure at the company, Boland testified, there was never a lock on user security, and Zuckerberg allegedly instilled in engineers that “the priorities were winning in growth and engagement.”
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Meta has repeatedly denied that it is trying to maximize user engagement on its platforms at the expense of ensuring their well-being. In recent weeks, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosserihave testified that building platforms that users enjoy is a priority.
