Someone inside Instagram proposed switching its break reminder on by default. The proposal was rejected because the cost to the app’s core metrics was not desirable.
George Volichenko, a former Meta data scientist, told that to a jury in Oakland this week. Mike Swift reported the testimony from the courtroom for MLex.
Volichenko worked on Instagram’s mental wellbeing team from April 2022 to February 2023. One of his first tasks was to measure how many teenagers used “Take a Break”, which prompts a 10-minute pause once a session passes a set length.
The answer was almost nobody
Roughly two in every 1,000 weekly teenage users took up the excessive-use features, Volichenko testified. He called that very low, almost negligible.
