Meta knew that Instagram's tools for protecting teenagers were largely ineffective, witnesses testified on Tuesday in a trial where 29 US states accuse the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp of lying about the risks of its platforms. The trial is taking place in California and is expected to run through late September, according to Brazil's G1 and the news agency AFP.
Internal company documents shown to jurors revealed that Take a Break, a feature that lets users set reminders to stop scrolling, had an adoption rate of just 1.8 percent. Quiet Mode, which silences nighttime notifications, was used by 8.7 percent of users. Francesco Fogu, Instagram's director of product design, said under questioning that he could not confirm those figures but acknowledged the company 'knew adoption rates would be lower' when the tools were not turned on by default.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide the case using the jury's verdict as guidance, appeared surprised that Fogu claimed not to know the company's own internal data, according to AFP. Fogu was occasionally combative during questioning by a lawyer for the states; asked whether Meta wanted to keep certain data from becoming public, he replied, 'Who's Meta? Me?'
Former employees back up the claims
Other former Meta employees testified along similar lines. 'In my experience, Take a Break is a feature that's designed to fail,' Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, testified the previous week. George Volichenko, a data scientist who worked on Instagram's safety features in 2022 and 2023, said adoption rates for those tools were 'very low and disappointing' and described Meta's leadership as uninterested in meaningfully boosting their use.
According to Volichenko, Meta's 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. Switching the safety features on by default would have caused a notable negative impact on user engagement, he said. That matters because Meta's business model runs on advertising sales, and the company earns more the longer users stay on its apps.
The states bringing the case are seeking roughly $200 billion in penalties, AFP reported, and a court loss could force structural changes to Meta's business model with ripple effects across the social media industry. Instagram head Adam Mosseri was expected to take the stand Tuesday afternoon, and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also expected to testify, according to court documents cited by the agency.