The head of Instagram said the company spent years trying to persuade teens to “take a break.”
Adam Mosseri testified Tuesday on the witness stand in Meta’s social media addiction trial in Oakland that relatively few teens initially opted into “Take a Break,” a well-being feature designed to encourage users to step away from the app after a set amount of scrolling.
“Most people don’t turn it on, but I don’t think we knew that yet because this was still under development,” Mosseri told the jury. “Actually, we found out that a lot of people didn’t turn it on, and we’ve had to make a lot of changes over the last few years in order to have it be more adopted. This was back in 2021.”
Mosseri said Instagram first tried showing teens notifications encouraging them to activate the reminders. The strategy produced some improvement, he said, but fell well short of the company’s expectations.
“It started very low. We started trying to do those notifications, encouraging teens to turn it on themselves,” Mosseri said. “That helped, but not nearly as much as we had hoped. And then we eventually made it on by default as part of Teen Accounts.”
A coalition of attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, has accused Meta of exploiting young users for profit by designing its platforms to keep them hooked. The states also allege that Meta violated children’s privacy protections and misled the public about the platforms’ safety.
Tuesday’s testimony also called into question how Instagram publicly presented Take a Break’s performance.
An internal Meta document shown during the testimony said adoption had been “modest at 1.8%” back in 2021. According to Instagram’s public blog post in December 2021, 90% of teens who turned on Take a Break kept it on, which did not include the statistic that only 1.8% had activated the feature in the first place.
“Early test results show that once teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them on,” Instagram wrote at the time.
When asked whether the public post disclosed that adoption was low, Mosseri said, “No, because we were planning on iterating on it and trying to drive that number up over time, which we did.”
“My expectation is that we were going to raise awareness and let the teens who want the feature turn it on,” Mosseri said. “Turned out most teens didn’t want it. We decided to push forward with it anyway.”
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