Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s chief at Meta, revealed in a California courtroom on Wednesday that he had promoted new safety features for teens without mentioning the low use they experienced in initial tests a few years prior.
Meta, the tech giant with a user base exceeding three billion worldwide, is currently battling accusations from a collective of 29 US states. These states claim that the company consciously engineered its platforms to captivate minors and harvest their personal data, all while obscuring the truth from the public.
The ongoing trial moved into its second week on Monday, with proceedings anticipated to extend into late September.
A legal representative from the Colorado attorney general’s office, Jason Slothouber, pressed Mosseri about the lackluster engagement with Instagram’s features, Take a Break and Quiet Mode, which were introduced in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
During the past week, several witnesses have reported that these features weren’t particularly effective, though Mosseri refuted claims of their low adoption rates.
“This is one feature with a disappointingly low usage rate which since this time has significantly improved,” Mosseri said.
On 8 December 2021, Mosseri testified at a Congressional hearing about the negative impacts of social media on young people. One day before, Meta published a blog post, authored by Mosseri, about rolling out new safety features for teens.
“Early test results show that once teens set the reminders, more than 90 per cent of them keep them on,” the blog post said.
However, that number referred to the number of people who kept it on after turning it on.
When asked if Meta disclosed its low adoption, which only reached 1 or 2 per cent of the accounts, Mosseri admitted the company did not but said the safety features were later turned on by default in Teen Accounts, which have parental controls and launched in 2024.
However, Mosseri couldn’t recall if Meta had ever disclosed the percentage of teen accounts that have parental controls turned on.
Mosseri will continue testifying on Wednesday. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also expected to testify, though it’s unclear when.
‘Disappointing’ adoption
Meta knew that its tools for protecting teenagers on Instagram were largely ineffective, other witnesses have testified.
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Internal Meta documents shown to jurors on Tuesday said that Take a Break, which allows users to set reminders to stop scrolling, reached an adoption rate of 1.8 per cent, while Quiet Mode, which silences late-night notifications, reached 8.7 per cent.
Under questioning from state lawyers, Francesco Fogu, Meta’s director of product design at Instagram, said Wednesday that he was not aware of the numbers, but conceded that the company “knew adoption rates would be lower” if those tools were not turned on by default.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide the case using the jury’s verdict as guidance, appeared stunned that Fogu was unaware of the internal data.
If Meta is convicted, US states will seek around US$200 billion ($279 billion) in penalties, and a court loss could force fundamental changes to its business model and send shockwaves through the industry.
Two former employees also testified that Take a Break and Quiet Mode were not effective.
“In my experience, Take a Break is a feature that’s designed to fail,” Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, testified last week.
George Volichenko, a data scientist who worked on safety features at Instagram in 2022 and 2023, said Tuesday that adoption rates for those features were “very low and disappointing” and just “a drop in the ocean”.
He painted Meta’s leadership as uninterested in meaningfully boosting their use.
Leadership did not approve turning on Quiet Mode by default for younger teens, which held down adoption because the setting was hard to find in the app, Volichenko said.
Switching the safety features on by default would have caused a “notable negative impact” on user engagement, he said.
Meta’s business model revolves around selling advertising, and the company earns more when users spend more time on its apps.
In the last year, countries around the world have started to institute mandated social media bans for users under 16 years of age. Australia was among the first, the Albanese government’s Under-16 social media safety laws coming into effect on 10 December 2025.
Meta, along with a number of social media giants like Snapchat and TikTok, initially criticised the legislation — Meta even held an Instagram safety camp for paid influencers in Sydney — but ultimately complied.