A high-stakes antitrust and consumer protection trial against Meta, the parent company of one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, entered its second week this week, with explosive testimony from top Meta executives revealing gaps between the company’s public promises about teen online safety and its internal data.
The case, brought by a coalition of 33 U.S. states that accuses Meta of deliberately designing its products including Instagram to addict young users, harvest their personal data, and mislead the public about the company’s safety commitments, has already exposed sharp contradictions between Meta’s public messaging and internal records. The trial, which opened in a California federal court last week, is scheduled to run through late September, with Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg expected to take the stand at a yet-to-be-announced date.
On Tuesday, Adam Mosseri, Meta’s head of Instagram, acknowledged under questioning from attorneys representing the states that he publicly promoted two flagship teen safety tools, Take a Break and Quiet Mode, when they launched without disclosing that early testing showed just a tiny fraction of teen users actually activated the features. Launched in 2021 and 2023 respectively, the two tools were billed as solutions to excessive teen scrolling and harmful late-night social media use: Take a Break lets users set custom reminders to step away from the app, while Quiet Mode mutes notifications after hours.
In a 2021 blog post published the day before Mosseri’s Congressional testimony on social media’s harm to young people, he highlighted that 90% of teens who activated the Take a Break reminder kept the feature turned on. What the post did not mention, Mosseri confirmed Tuesday, was that only 1% to 2% of all teen accounts had ever activated the tool at all. Internal documents shown to the jury this week put the final adoption rate for Take a Break at 1.8%, while Quiet Mode reached just 8.7% of users. Mosseri pushed back on claims that adoption remains low, noting that the features were added as default settings to the new Teen Accounts with parental controls that Meta rolled out in 2024, but he could not recall if the company has ever publicly disclosed how many teen accounts actually have parental controls enabled.
Francesco Fogu, Instagram’s director of product design, also testified Tuesday, confirming that Meta leadership knew adoption of the voluntary safety tools would remain low if they were not activated by default. Fogu told the court he was unaware of the specific internal adoption numbers, a revelation that appeared to surprise presiding Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will issue a final ruling guided by the jury’s verdict.
Multiple former Meta employees have already testified that the low adoption rates were not an accident, but a deliberate outcome tied to Meta’s advertising-dependent business model, which relies on maximizing user time spent on the platform. Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, called Take a Break “a feature that was designed to fail” in his testimony last week. George Volichenko, a former Instagram data scientist who worked on the safety features between 2022 and 2023, told the court Monday that leadership refused to enable Quiet Mode by default for younger teens because the default setting would have caused a measurable drop in user engagement. Volichenko added that the tools’ adoption rates were “very low and disappointing” and that Meta leadership showed no interest in taking meaningful steps to boost usage, calling the tiny uptake “just a drop in the ocean.”
If the court finds Meta liable in the case, the states are seeking roughly $200 billion in financial penalties. A ruling against Meta would also almost certainly force sweeping changes to the company’s core business model for its social platforms, sending major ripples across the global technology industry. Mosseri is expected to continue his testimony on Wednesday, while the timeline for Zuckerberg’s appearance remains unconfirmed.