LOS ANGELES, Feb 26: A landmark social media addiction trial resumed with a YouTube executive insisting that the Google-owned platform was designed to provide value to viewers — not to hook them into harmful binge-watching.
YouTube Vice President of Engineering Cristos Goodrow was pressed to defend the company’s self-described “big, hairy, audacious goal,” set more than a decade ago, of increasing watch time to more than one billion hours per day by 2016.
Addiction
As he did last week when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in the same Los Angeles court, plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier told jurors that Goodrow’s compensation rose along with the company’s share price, suggesting he personally benefited from boosting user engagement.
“YouTube is not designed to maximize time,” Goodrow replied, as he was shown internal documents indicating that viewer engagement was a key performance priority at the platform. “It’s designed to give people the most value.”
Seeking to counter that claim, Lanier asked Goodrow to describe the rollout of features such as personalized viewing recommendations, autoplay, targeted advertising, and a version of YouTube tailored specifically for children.
The attorney argued that such features drew users onto a “treadmill of continuous checking” for new content. Goodrow responded that “we don’t want anybody to be addicted to anything,” pushing back against suggestions that YouTube was engineered to keep users compulsively engaged.
He also rejected efforts to equate YouTube with social media networks such as Facebook or Snapchat, emphasizing that the platform is not primarily designed as a space for friends to connect or for sharing disappearing messages.
