Instagram Chief Denies Hiding Teen Safety Tool Failure

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri took the witness stand Tuesday in Oakland and denied that Meta hid how few teenagers used its flagship teen safety feature.

"I am not trying to encourage my team to hide anything," Mosseri told the federal courtroom, according to The Guardian. Pressed on why Meta never published the adoption numbers for its "Take a Break" tool, he said: "We don't publish every single stat."

Mosseri is the first top Meta executive to testify in the case, brought by 29 states that accuse the company of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children.

Separately, Bloomberg reported that Meta and state attorneys general have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement, citing people familiar with the matter.

What The Numbers Show

Jason Slothouber, a senior prosecutor for the Colorado attorney general's office, pointed the jury at a single figure: 1.8% of teens signed up for Take a Break, the feature that nudges users to close the app after a long scrolling session.

An internal Meta document shown in court described adoption as "modest at 1.8%" in 2021, Business Insider reported. Instagram's public blog post that December instead said "more than 90%" of teens who set the reminders kept them on — without saying how few had turned them on at all.

Asked whether the public post disclosed that adoption was low, Mosseri said, "No, because we were planning on iterating on it and trying to drive that number up over time, which we did."

He also told jurors: "My expectation is that we were going to raise awareness and let the teens who want the feature turn it on. Turned out most teens didn't want it. We decided to push forward with it anyway."

Bloomberg reported that a former Meta data scientist testified less than 1% of teenagers were early adopters of the tool.