Instagram chief takes the stand in a trial pitting Meta against states over social media harms

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive at the helm of Instagram, defended the platform’s safety record in testimony Tuesday and took issue with a plaintiff attorney’s emphasis on low usage numbers for a feature designed to encourage young users to take breaks.

Mosseri was appearing at a trial that pits Meta against the states of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which accuse the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms.

Jason Slothouber, a senior prosecutor for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, pressed Mosseri on the low adoption rate among teens for the “take a break” feature, which prompts users to step away if they’ve been scrolling a while. Very few teens used the feature when Instagram first introduced it, but since launching separate teen accounts in 2024, Meta has made it the default setting for teenage users.

Mosseri appeared frustrated that Slothouber was focusing on a single Instagram safety feature when the Meta executive said, “There are many features we launch over many aspects of safety and well-being” that the company tries to improve over time.

The trial began last week in federal court in Oakland, California, and is expected to last about six weeks. The four states were among 29 that sued the tech giant in 2023 over child safety and privacy — the other 25 will go to trial later. The company also faces lawsuits in state courts, including one underway in Tennessee.

Mosseri, who has led Instagram since 2018, testified for about an hour and is due back on the stand Wednesday. He also testified earlier this year in the Los Angeles state court trial that pitted Meta and YouTube against a 20-year-old plaintiff identified only by the initials “KGM,” who said she became addicted to social media as a child. Meta and Google were found liable for harms caused by their platforms, and KGM was awarded a total of $6 million.

In earlier testimony at the Oakland trial, Francesco Fogu, Instagram’s director of product design, had contentious exchanges with the plaintiffs’ lawyer over internal chats and documents shown to the jury. In one instance, jurors were shown a passage from a document saying, “As a company, we make different choices when it comes to regulatory response. Sometimes we don’t comply and accept a fine. Sometimes we comply in the most minimal or literal way possible.”

Fogu said several times he did not remember whether he wrote those words. As Slothouber kept pressing, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stepped in to say, “We get the point.”

Jurors also heard from former Meta employee George Volichenko, who worked in marketing analytics and as a data scientist from 2016 to 2018 and from 2022 to 2023. During his second stint at the company, when he worked on Instagram’s mental well-being team, Volichenko said he was told the team exists primarily to protect the company in upcoming lawsuits.

In his experience, Volichenko said, “Everything I saw was kind of supporting that” — from having limited agency to feedback and guidance from leadership.

Discussing Instagram’s “take a break” feature, Volichenko said his team had argued it should be automatically turned on for younger teens who use Instagram. That’s because people are far more likely to use a feature if it is “opt-out” — that is, they need to manually turn it off if they don’t want to use it — rather than “opt-in,” which means they have to manually turn it on.

They did not get the approval.

“The tradeoff to core metrics was not desirable,” Volichenko said, referring to Meta’s metrics for how long and how often people use its products.

He soon left Meta a second time.

“I didn’t feel like the company at large was aligned with my values,” he said.