Instagram chief admits touting teen safety tool while omitting it was barely used

Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s overseer at Meta, testified in a California court on Tuesday that he promoted newly introduced safety tools for teenagers without revealing that adoption rates were alarmingly low from early testing years back. With over three billion users worldwide, Meta is facing accusations from a coalition of 29 US states that it knowingly designed its apps to addict children and collect their data while deceiving the public.

The trial, which entered its second week on Monday and is slated to conclude by late September, has heard testimonies from lawyers representing the Colorado Attorney General's office, who questioned Mosseri about the ineffective use of these tools, known as Take a Break and Quiet Mode, launched in 2021 and 2023, respectively. While Mosseri admitted that adoption rates were disappointing and later improved, he denied that they remained low.

In 2021, Mosseri testified at a Congressional hearing about social media's negative impact on young people, and a day prior, Meta released a blog post authored by him about launching new safety features for teens. Early test results indicated that once teens enabled reminders, over 90% kept them on, but this figure actually referred to those keeping the feature active after activation.

When asked about Meta's lack of disclosure of the low adoption rate, which only reached 1 or 2 percent of accounts, Mosseri admitted that the company was unaware but claimed the features were subsequently turned on by default for teen accounts, launched in 2024. However, he could not recall if Meta had ever disclosed the percentage of teen accounts with parental controls enabled.

Meta's internal documents revealed that Take a Break, which prompts users to take breaks from scrolling, had an adoption rate of 1.8%, while Quiet Mode, which silences late-night notifications, reached 8.7%. Meta's director of product design at Instagram, Francesco Fogu, testified that the company was aware of the low adoption rates and conceded that they would be lower if the tools were not enabled by default.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, presiding over the case, expressed surprise at Fogu's lack of awareness of the internal data. If Meta is found guilty, US states plan to seek around US $200 billion in penalties, potentially causing significant changes to Meta's business model and disrupting the industry. Former employees also testified that Take a Break and Quiet Mode were ineffective, with former engineering director Arturo Bejar calling Take a Break a feature designed to fail, and data scientist George Volichenko describing adoption rates as very low and disappointing, attributing Meta's leadership's lack of interest in boosting their use.