Instagram's Adam Mosseri Admits Only 1.8% of Teens Used Anti-Addiction Tool Before Meta Made It Automatic

Instagram's top executive told a federal jury in Oakland that a feature built to stop teenagers from endlessly scrolling barely worked because almost nobody used it.

Adam Mosseri, who has run Instagram since 2018, testified Tuesday, August 25, in the trial pitting Meta against a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. An internal Meta document shown in court put adoption of the "Take a Break" feature at 1.8% among teens in 2021, according to NPR, CNBC, Al Jazeera, Business Insider and Reuters, all of whom reported the same figure from the same trial exhibit.

"It helped, but not nearly as much as we hoped," Mosseri said on the stand, according to NPR.

The feature, launched in 2021, sends teens a pop-up after a set amount of scrolling suggesting they close the app. Meta didn't make it the default setting for teen accounts until "teen accounts" themselves rolled out in 2024, per NPR and Reuters. That's roughly three years after the tool debuted.

Jason Slothouber, a trial attorney with the Colorado Attorney General's office, pressed Mosseri on why Meta waited. He noted the switch to default-on happened only after California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey had already filed suit against Meta in 2023, a timeline detail confirmed across NPR, CNBC and KPBS.

Mosseri didn't dispute the sequence. He said that by the time the feature became automatic, the earlier low-adoption numbers were "entirely moot," according to NPR and KPBS.

In December 2021, Instagram published a blog post claiming "more than 90% of teens who turned the feature on kept it on," according to Business Insider, Al Jazeera and Reuters. That statistic was accurate as far as it went, but it only described the tiny slice of users who had activated Take a Break in the first place, not the roughly 98% who never touched it.

Slothouber asked Mosseri directly whether parents had any way of knowing that only 1-2% of teens would actually use the feature at the time. "Correct," Mosseri answered, per NPR, Houston Public Media and KPBS. Asked whether Meta had ever disclosed that number publicly, Mosseri again said, "Correct."

Business Insider's account adds Mosseri's own explanation for the omission: "No, because we were planning on iterating on it and trying to drive that number up over time, which we did." Mosseri also told the jury, "Most teens didn't want it. We decided to push forward with it anyway," a line reported by Al Jazeera, Business Insider and Reuters.

The trial's sharper edge Tuesday involved whether Instagram executives were shielded from unflattering internal data. Engadget reported that a 2023 slide deck built by Instagram's own product design team found that suicide, self-injury and eating-disorder content had a "disproportionately large teen audience," two-and-a-half times bigger than among adults, and that teens viewed content deemed "non-recommendable" for them at 1.5 times the adult rate.

According to messages shown in court and reported by Engadget, a Meta lawyer told employees preparing that presentation to remove those statistics specifically to "limit" Mosseri's "exposure to this information." Instagram's Director of Product Design, Francesco Fogu, testified he was "surprised" by the instruction because he'd never before been told to "hide data from leadership." Fogu said he still verbally briefed executives on the numbers, and the underlying data remained accessible in linked reports.

Mosseri told the jury it was "news to me" that any such instruction existed, per Engadget. "I'm not trying to encourage my team to hide anything," he said, adding that he assumed any document edits by lawyers were about ensuring legal accuracy, not limiting what he saw, according to CNBC.

Mosseri also acknowledged, per CNBC, that Meta reduced how many employees could access certain internal youth-safety research after whistleblower Frances Haugen's 2021 document leaks, which the Wall Street Journal published as "The Facebook Files." Mosseri said the goal was preventing material from being "taken out of context," not shrinking the research effort itself. "I don't think the team was smaller, it was just centralized," he said.

The states allege Meta violated the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and state consumer protection laws by designing Instagram and Facebook to be habit-forming for minors and misrepresenting the safety measures it had in place, according to CNBC and Al Jazeera. All 29 states in the coalition additionally allege Meta improperly collected data from children under 13. Combined penalties sought could reach roughly $200 billion, per CNBC, Al Jazeera and Reuters.

Meta has denied designing its platforms to addict children and says its own research found no clear link between teen social media use and reduced well-being, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters. Mosseri, for his part, framed Take a Break and Quiet Mode as just two of many incremental fixes rather than a single solution: "There are no silver bullets to problems like this. We have to do many things that add up," he testified, per NPR and KPBS.

Mosseri's testimony was scheduled to continue Wednesday, August 26, according to CNBC. The jury has not yet heard closing arguments, and no verdict has been reached.