Instagram boss Adam Mosseri sat in an Oakland federal courtroom Tuesday and admitted under oath that Meta publicly touted a teen safety feature while concealing that only 1.8% of young users actually used it — and that parents had no way to know.
Four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are suing Meta for deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding the resulting harms. The potential penalties could reach $200 billion, according to CNBC. The trial, now in its second week, is pulling back the curtain on how a company with 2 billion daily active users on Instagram alone treats the kids who scroll its feed.
The centerpiece of Tuesday's testimony was "Take a Break," a feature Instagram introduced in 2021 that prompts young users to pause after extended scrolling. Mosseri blogged at the time that "more than 90%" of users kept the feature on. What he didn't say: barely anyone used it in the first place. An internal document entered into evidence showed just 1.8% of teens engaged with it.
Pressed by Colorado prosecutor Jason Slothouber, Mosseri confirmed there was no way for parents to know that figure — and that Meta has never disclosed it. "Correct," he said, twice.
The feature wasn't made default for teen accounts until late 2024 — after the states had already sued in 2023. Slothouber noted the timing. Mosseri called the earlier low-uptake point "entirely moot."
The Baltimore Sun and AP reported that Mosseri appeared frustrated at the focus on a single feature, telling the court: "There are many features we launch over many aspects of safety and well-being." But former employees undercut that framing. George Volichenko, who worked on Instagram's mental well-being team from 2022 to 2023, testified that he was told the team existed primarily to protect the company in upcoming lawsuits. "Everything I saw was kind of supporting that," he said — citing limited agency and leadership that gave little real guidance.
Volichenko said his team argued that "Take a Break" should be opt-out, not opt-in, for younger teens, because default settings are what actually drive usage. That argument lost internally — until after the lawsuits filed.
Another internal document shown to the jury captured Instagram's director of product design Francesco Fogu, or someone on his team, writing: "As a company, we make different choices when it comes to regulatory response. Sometimes we don't comply and accept a fine. Sometimes we comply in the most minimal or literal way possible." Fogu said he didn't remember writing it.
Mosseri also acknowledged that Meta restricted employee access to internal research after Frances Haugen's 2021 document leak, saying the company didn't want anything "taken out of context." He pushed back on the suggestion that Meta shrank its youth mental health research team, insisting it was "centralized, not smaller."
This isn't Meta's first courtroom loss on these questions. Mosseri testified earlier this year in a Los Angeles case where Meta and Google were found liable for harms caused to a young plaintiff identified as "KGM," who became addicted to social media as a child. The award: $6 million.
Meta's business model depends on attention — the more scrolling, the more ad revenue. Children, with their still-developing impulse control, are the easiest marks. The question now is whether a federal jury will treat what internal documents describe as a deliberate strategy as what the states call it: a violation of consumer protection and children's privacy law. Twenty-five more states are lined up for their own trials after this one concludes.
