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OAKLAND, Calif. – The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in court on Tuesday that a feature introduced in 2021 to try to help teens regulate their time on the app had lower uptake than he had hoped for and he wished it had been fixed sooner.
Attorneys representing California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are suing Instagram's parent company Meta, accusing it of designing Instagram and its other flagship platform, Facebook, to hook kids and harvest their data and of hiding the truth about dangers the platforms posed to young people. In an Oakland, California courtroom, attorneys for Meta have denied the accusations and sought to show that the company was sensitive to the risks of overuse, and tried to address them.
Under questioning from a lawyer for the states, Mosseri spoke about the feature, called Take a Break, which has a pop-up message suggesting to young users that they pause their use of the app once they have been on it for a fixed period of time. In court, an internal document admitted as evidence by the prosecution showed that at one point only 1.8% of teens actually used the feature.
The pop-up notifications "helped, but not nearly as much as we hoped," Mosseri said.
In late 2024 the company made the feature the default on all teen accounts, which were also introduced that year. By then, Mosseri said, the point about initial low uptake was "entirely moot."
But Jason Slothouber, with the Colorado Attorney General's office, pushed back, noting that the change was made after the states had already sued Meta in 2023.
The states argue that Meta withheld relevant information from users and parents, who might have benefited from knowing the ineffectiveness of the feature and others like it, constituting a violation of consumer protection laws. And to press that point, Slothouber noted a blog post from Mosseri around the time the feature was introduced that stated that "more than 90%" of users of the feature kept it on. But, he noted, Mosseri did not indicate that a very low number of people actually used the feature in the first place.
Asked to confirm that there was no way at the time for parents to know that only 1-2% of teens would use the feature, Mosseri replied: "Correct." Asked to confirm that Meta has never disclosed the figure, Mosseri again said: "Correct."
Mosseri noted that Take a Break and Quiet Mode, another feature that silences Instagram alerts, were a small number of the many features Meta has introduced to try to address problematic use by teens, a remark that appeared to jibe with Meta's broader argument in court that it was aware of issues involving teens and took many steps to address them.
"In general, there are no silver bullets to problems like this. We have to do many things that add up," Mosseri said.
The trial is part of a surge of cases brought against tech companies in the wake of various studies and public health advisories saying that social media can cause harm to the mental health of young users.
Mosseri is a longtime Meta employee who started as a product designer just three years out of college in 2008, when the company was called Facebook, and worked his way up to helm of one of the world's most popular social media apps. He has been the head of Instagram since 2018.
Meta reported in July that Instagram has 2 billion daily active users — nearly a quarter of the Earth's population. The app is particularly popular among young people; according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, roughly six in 10 U.S. teens say they use Instagram. Roughly half of teens say they use it every day.
Slothouber also asked Mosseri about communications among Instagram employees about a presentation that they were preparing to give Mosseri that dealt with the kinds of problematic content teens are exposed to on Instagram. The communications refer to the product designers having been advised by Meta's lawyers to limit what data Mosseri would see in the presentation to check his "litigation exposure."
Mosseri said he was not aware of this exchange, but added that it "makes sense" that the document's creators would want to be sure the information was accurate and truthful.
In what seemed to be an effort to show that Meta prioritized avoiding legal liability over sharing important data with Mosseri, Slothouber asked Mosseri if it would be fair to say that a product designer or person who deals with data in their job would have a better understanding of what data is important to present to him than a lawyer.
"Yes, I think a lawyer would be a less qualified designer than a product designer," Mosseri said.
Mosseri defended Meta's efforts to protect teens, and voiced opposition to what he considered the use of certain bits of information out of context.
"I think parents want to have good information about services, risks, etc. That's different than reporters or lawyers taking small bits from much larger documents and focusing on them in things like articles and trials," he said.
The stakes in this case are high for Meta, a market leader and one of the most profitable social media companies in the world. An initial estimate of potential penalties runs as high as $1.4 trillion — roughly the entire value of Meta's equity on the Nasdaq.
Some legal experts compare this moment to landmark litigation against tobacco companies in the 1990s that forced them into big settlements and changed their behavior — and the public discussion about the risks of cigarettes.
Mosseri is expected to continue on the stand again on Wednesday. The trial is expected to last about five more weeks.
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