Berliner Boersenzeitung - Instagram chief admits touting teen safety tool while omitting it was barely used

With more than three billion users around the world, Meta is fending off accusations by a coalition of 29 US states that it deliberately designed its products to hook children and gather their data while misleading the public.

The trial entered its second week on Monday and is expected to last through late September.

A lawyer with the Colorado Attorney General's office, Jason Slothouber, questioned Mosseri about the low usage of the tools, known as Take a Break and Quiet Mode, which were launched in 2021 and 2023, respectively.

Other witnesses have testified over the past week that these tools weren't effective, though Mosseri pushed back on the idea that adoption remains low.

"This is one feature with a disappointingly low usage rate which since this time has significantly improved," Mosseri said.

On December 8, 2021, Mosseri testified at a Congressional hearing about the negative impacts of social media on young people. One day before, Meta published a blog post, authored by Mosseri, about rolling out new safety features for teens.

"Early test results show that once teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them on," the blog post says.

However, that number referred to the number of people who kept it on after turning it on.

When asked if Meta disclosed its low adoption, which only reached 1 or 2 percent of the accounts, Mosseri admitted the company did not but said the safety features were later turned on by default in Teen Accounts, which have parental controls and launched in 2024.

However, Mosseri couldn't recall if Meta had ever disclosed the percentage of teen accounts that have parental controls turned on.

Mosseri will continue testifying on Wednesday. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also expected to testify, though it's unclear when.

-'Disappointing' adoption-

Meta knew that its tools for protecting teenagers on Instagram were largely ineffective, other witnesses have testified.

Internal Meta documents shown to jurors on Tuesday said that Take a Break, which allows users to set reminders to stop scrolling, reached an adoption rate of 1.8 percent, while Quiet Mode, which silences late-night notifications, reached 8.7 percent.

Under questioning from state lawyers, Francesco Fogu, Meta's director of product design at Instagram, said Tuesday that he was not aware of the numbers, but conceded that the company "knew adoption rates would be lower" if those tools were not turned on by default.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide the case using the jury's verdict as guidance, appeared stunned that Fogu was unaware of the internal data.

If Meta is convicted, US states will seek around $200 billion in penalties, and a court loss could force fundamental changes to its business model and send shockwaves through the industry.

Two former employees also testified that Take a Break and Quiet Mode were not effective.

"In my experience, Take a Break is a feature that's designed to fail," Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, testified last week.

George Volichenko, a data scientist who worked on safety features at Instagram in 2022 and 2023, said Monday that adoption rates for those features were "very low and disappointing" and just "a drop in the ocean."

He painted Meta's leadership as uninterested in meaningfully boosting their use.

Leadership did not approve turning on Quiet Mode by default for younger teens, which held down adoption because the setting was hard to find in the app, Volichenko said.

Switching the safety features on by default would have caused a "notable negative impact" on user engagement, he said.

Meta's business model revolves around selling advertising, and the company earns more when users spend more time on its apps.

(Y.Berger--BBZ)