Brian Boland dedicated over ten years to developing a strategy that would ensure Meta’s financial success. On Thursday, he revealed to a California jury that this approach encouraged increasing user numbers, including teenagers, on Facebook and Instagram, despite potential dangers.

Boland’s statements followed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in a case questioning whether Meta and YouTube are responsible for allegedly impacting a young woman’s mental health. While Zuckerberg portrayed Meta’s mission as a balance between safety and free expression, Boland aimed to expose how profit motives influenced platform designs. He claimed that Zuckerberg nurtured a culture prioritizing growth and profit over user wellbeing. Although labeled a whistleblower—a term Meta sought to downplay to avoid jury bias—the judge generally allowed its use. Boland, who spent 11 years at Meta, described his journey from having unwavering trust in the company to firmly believing that competition, power, and growth were Zuckerberg’s primary interests.

Before leaving Meta in 2020, Boland served as the VP of partnerships, tasked with bringing revenue-generating content to the platform. He had previously held various advertising roles since 2009. Boland recounted that Facebook’s well-known motto, “move fast and break things,” embodied a company-wide philosophy. The slogan encouraged employees not to worry about potential problems with new products but to launch them swiftly and learn from experience. At its peak, employees would find messages like “what will you break today?” at their desks, Boland noted.

Boland stated that Zuckerberg consistently communicated his priorities to the company, clarifying the focus during all-hands meetings. Whether it was making products mobile-first or staying ahead of rivals, Zuckerberg left no doubt about the company’s direction. Boland recalled how Zuckerberg, upon recognizing the need to compete with Google’s rumored social network (likely Google+), introduced a digital countdown clock to track the time remaining to meet objectives during company “lockdowns.” According to Boland, there was never a lockdown focused on user safety, and engineers were encouraged to prioritize growth and engagement.

Meta has consistently denied prioritizing user engagement over user safety. Recently, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified that their decisions are guided by the long-term goal of creating platforms that users enjoy and find beneficial.

Boland disputes this. “My experience was that when there were opportunities to really try to understand what the products might be doing harmfully in the world, that those were not the priority,” he testified. “Those were more of a problem than an opportunity to fix.”

When safety issues came up through press reports or regulatory questions, Boland said, “the primary response was to figure out how to manage through the press cycle, to what the media was saying, as opposed to saying, ‘let’s take a step back and really deeply understand.” Though Boland said he told his advertising-focused team that they should be the ones to discover “broken parts,” rather than those outside the company, he said that philosophy didn’t extend to the rest of the company.

On the stand the day before, Zuckerberg pointed to documents around 2019 showing disagreement among his employees with his decisions, saying they demonstrated a culture that encourages a diversity of opinion. Boland, however, testified that while that might have been the case earlier in his tenure, it later became “a very closed down culture.”

Since the jury can only consider decisions and products that Meta itself made, rather than content it hosted from users, lead plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier also had Boland describe how Meta’s algorithm works, and the decisions that went into making and testing it. Algorithms have an “immense amount of power,” Boland said, and are “absolutely relentless” in pursuing their programmed goals — in many cases at Meta, that was allegedly engagement. “There’s not a moral algorithm, that’s not a thing,” Boland said. “Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t care.”

During his testimony on Wednesday, Zuckerberg commented that Boland “developed some strong political opinions” toward the end of his time at the company. (Neither Zuckerberg nor Boland offered specifics, but in a 2025 blog post, Boland indicated he was deleting his Facebook account in part over disagreements with how Meta handled events like January 6th, writing that he believed “Facebook had contributed to spreading ‘Stop the Steal’ propaganda and enabling this attempted coup.”) Lanier spent time establishing that Boland was respected by peers, showing a CNBC article about his departure that quoted a glowing statement from his then-boss, and a reference to an unnamed source who reportedly described Boland as someone with a strong moral character.

On cross examination, Meta attorney Phyllis Jones clarified that Boland didn’t work on the teams tasked with understanding youth safety at the company. Boland agreed that advertising business models are not inherently bad, and neither are algorithms. He also admitted that many of his concerns involved the content users were posting, which is not relevant to the current case.

During his direct examination, Lanier asked if Boland had ever expressed his concerns to Zuckerberg directly. Boland said he’d told the CEO he’d seen concerning data showing “harmful outcomes” of the company’s algorithms and suggested that they investigate further. He recalled Zuckerberg responding something to the effect of, “I hope there’s still things you’re proud of.” Soon after, he said, he quit.

Boland said he left upwards of $10 million worth of unvested Meta stock on the table when he departed, though he admitted he made more than that over the years. He said he still finds it “nerve-wracking” every time he speaks out about the company. “This is an incredibly powerful company,” he said.