Meta Exec Admits Building Teen Addictions as Business Strategy, Shockingly
KEY POINTS
- •Brian Boland testified on Thursday that Meta designed their platforms to keep drawing teens back for profit.
- •This came a day after CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed Meta balances safety and free speech, not revenue.
- •Boland explained how Meta’s monetization shaped Facebook and Instagram’s addictive features during a California court case.
Brian Boland, the Meta wizard who spent over a decade crafting a 'system to make Meta money,' laid it all out for a California jury on a Thursday that nobody brought popcorn for. This dude literally admitted the platform was designed to lure an army of teens into endless scrolling — because who needs sleep when you can have ad dollars? His testimony landed just a day after Mark Zuckerberg tried to convince everyone that Meta is just a cozy clubhouse balancing 'free expression' and 'safety,' not a billion-dollar dopamine trap. So yes, Facebook and Instagram’s secret sauce is a cocktail of teens + addictive algorithms + money printing — all served up in Silicon Valley’s finest court drama.
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Nothing screams 'we care about teen mental health' like publicly admitting you engineered a social media dopamine farm to squeeze every cent out of scrolling teenagers.
Meta’s business model is basically 'get teens addicted, then boy, do the ad dollars stack up.' Mark, did your mission statement come with fine print?
Zuckerberg says Meta balances safety and free expression, while his exec spills the tea that it’s mostly about safely exploiting teenage dopamine highs.
Source: Theverge | Published: 2/19/2026 | Author: Lauren Feiner
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