LOS ANGELES: A landmark social media addiction trial resumed with a YouTube executive insisting that the Google-owned company’s aim was to give people value, not hook them on harmful binge-viewing.

YouTube vice president of engineering Cristos Goodrow was pressed to defend the company’s self-styled “big, hairy, audacious goal,” set more than a decade ago, to increase viewer time to more than a billion hours a day by 2016.

As he did last week when Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified in the same Los Angeles court, plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier told jurors that Goodrow’s compensation climbed with his company’s share price, meaning he profited personally from ramping up user engagement.

“YouTube is not designed to maximize time,” Goodrow replied, as he was shown company documents indicating that viewer engagement was a priority for performance at the platform.

“It’s designed to give people the most value...” As a counterpoint, Lanier had Goodrow detail the addition of features including viewing recommendations, auto-play for videos and ads, and a version of YouTube designed specifically for children.

The lawyer said these efforts enticed users to a “treadmill of continuous checking” for new content. Goodrow contended “we don’t want anybody to be addicted to anything” as Lanier pressed him about YouTube features crafted to keep viewers watching.

The executive pushed back against efforts by Lanier to put YouTube on par with social networks such as Facebook or Snapchat, stressing the platform was not a forum for friends to connect or for sharing vanishing messages.

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2026