Adam Mosseri, who has run Instagram since 2018, told a federal jury in Oakland that the app’s “Take a Break” feature “helped, but not nearly as much as we hoped”, as internal documents showed only 1.8% of teenagers used it.
Meta’s public blog post at the time said more than 90% of users who turned it on kept it enabled, a framing that has now been put to the head of Instagram in a trial where the numbers being argued over run to the trillions.
The two figures are not contradictory, which is precisely the problem. One describes retention among the small group who enabled the feature, the other describes how many teenagers ever did, and only one of them made it into the blog post.
Mosseri confirmed under questioning that Meta never disclosed the low adoption rate to parents or the public. That admission is the sort of thing plaintiffs build closing arguments around.
The case is brought by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, four of the 29 states pursuing Meta over youth harm, and they are seeking roughly $200bn. Jury selection began on 12 August, and the trial is expected to run around five more weeks.
