A former Instagram data scientist told a jury this week that Meta refused to make a teen safety feature the default setting because it would hurt engagement metrics — confirming what parents already suspect: Big Tech puts profits over your kids.
The testimony, from a subpoenaed employee who worked on Instagram's mental wellbeing team, exposes the gap between Meta's public posture on child safety and its private calculations. But the deeper problem is this: the states now suing Meta want government-mandated safety defaults, and that road leads straight to government-mandated censorship. Neither Silicon Valley nor Washington should control what your children see.
George Volichenko testified in Oakland that his first task on the wellbeing team was to measure how many teenagers used Instagram's "Take a Break" feature, which prompts a 10-minute pause after extended scrolling. The answer: almost nobody. Roughly two in every 1,000 weekly teenage users engaged with the excessive-use features, according to TNW's courtroom reporting. Fewer than 0.165% of teenage users turned the tool on and actually took the break. A later review put the figure at 0.2%, which Volichenko called "a drop in the ocean."
Making the feature opt-out — on by default — was considered and rejected. Volichenko told the jury there was "a lot of fear" that a default safety feature would produce "large declines" in core metrics. If that happened, "multiple levels of leadership would have to report it upwards and explain why they were tanking the numbers."
Meanwhile, Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote on Meta's website in 2021 that "early results were promising" and "once teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them on." Both statements are technically true: almost everyone who turned the tool on kept it, and almost nobody turned it on. WJLA framed Meta's position by noting the company says it "has invested in teen-safety features, parental controls, and other protections." TNW led with the damning adoption metrics. The truth lives in the gap.
Volichenko also testified that when he raised the low adoption figures internally, his manager told him not to worry — the team existed partly to protect the company against the coming lawsuits. He was instructed to announce the findings as "improvements to the tool." He left Meta in 2023.
On cross-examination, Meta lawyer Brian Stekloff noted that even 0.2% of teen users represents hundreds of thousands of young people. Asked whether the company's public statements amounted to a "sham communication," Volichenko said no: "It was accurate. Our goal was reached. I just did not think it was an ambitious enough goal."
The trial stems from lawsuits by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey alleging Meta designed its platforms to keep young users compulsively engaged, misled the public about harms, and collected data from children under 13 without parental consent. Meta denies the claims. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify.
Meta built a Potemkin safety team to shield itself from liability. Now state governments want to replace corporate gatekeepers with government ones — and the same mechanism that forces break reminders today can force content restrictions tomorrow. The question isn't whether Meta cared about your kids. It didn't. The question is whether you trust the state to care more.
