Adam Mosseri (center), head of Instagram, arrives at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and the United States Courthouse as Meta is on trial for social media addiction in Oakland, California, on August 25, 2026. KARL MONDON/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption KARL MONDON/AFP via Getty Images Subscribe to NPR’s Up First morning newsletter for the stories you need to start your day OAKLAND, California – Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told court Tuesday that a feature introduced in 2021 to try to help teenagers regulate their time on the app had less take-up than he expected and he wished it had been fixed sooner. Lawyers representing California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are suing Meta, Instagram’s parent company, accusing it of designing Instagram and its other flagship platform, Facebook, to hook children and collect their data and of hiding the truth about the dangers the platforms posed to young people. In a court in Oakland, California, Meta’s lawyers denied the allegations and sought to show that the company was sensitive to the risks of overuse and sought to address them. Under questioning by an attorney for the states, Mosseri talked about the feature, called Take a Break, which has a pop-up message suggesting young users stop using the app once they have been on it for a fixed period of time. In court, an internal document admitted into evidence by the prosecution showed that at any given time only 1.8% of teenagers actually used the feature. Push notifications “helped, but not as much as we expected,” Mosseri said. In late 2024, the company made the feature default on all teen accounts, which were also introduced that year. By then, Mosseri said, the issue of initial low acceptance was “completely moot.” But Jason Slothouber of the Colorado Attorney General’s office responded, pointing out that the change was made after states had already sued Meta in 2023. The states argue that Meta withheld relevant information from users and parents, who could have benefited from learning about the ineffectiveness of the feature and others like it, which is a violation of consumer protection laws. And to drive that point home, Slothouber pointed to a blog post from Mosseri at the time the feature was introduced that said that “over 90%” of the feature’s users kept it on. But, he noted, Mosseri did not indicate that a very small number of people actually used the feature in the first place. When asked to confirm that at the time there was no way for parents to know that only 1 to 2% of teens would use the feature, Mosseri responded, “Correct.” When asked to confirm that Meta had never revealed the figure, Mosseri again said: “Correct.” Mosseri noted that Take a Break and Quiet Mode, another feature that silences Instagram alerts, were a small number of the many features Meta has introduced to try to address problematic use by teenagers, a comment that seemed to coincide with Meta’s broader argument in court that it was aware of problems involving teenagers and took many steps to address them. “In general, there are no magic solutions to problems like this. We have to do a lot of things that add up,” Mosseri said. The lawsuit is part of a wave of cases brought against technology companies in the wake of several studies and public health advisories that say social media can cause harm to the mental health of young users. Mosseri is a former Meta employee who started as a product designer just three years out of college in 2008, when the company was called Facebook, and worked his way up to running one of the most popular social media apps in the world. He has been the head of Instagram since 2018. Meta reported in July that Instagram has 2 billion daily active users, nearly a quarter of the world’s population. The app is especially popular among young people; According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, about six in 10 American teens say they use Instagram. About half of teens say they use it every day. Slothouber also asked Mosseri about communications between Instagram employees about a presentation they were preparing to give to Mosseri that dealt with the types of problematic content that teens are exposed to on Instagram. The submissions refer to Meta’s lawyers advising product designers to limit the data Mosseri would see in the presentation to check its “exposure to litigation.” Mosseri said he was not aware of this exchange, but added that “it makes sense” that the creators of the document would want to be sure that the information was accurate and truthful. In what appeared to be an effort to demonstrate that Meta prioritized avoiding legal liability over sharing important data with Mosseri, Slothouber asked Mosseri if it would be fair to say that a product designer or a person who deals with data in their job would have a better understanding of what data is important to present to them than a lawyer. “Yes, I think a lawyer would be a less qualified designer than a product designer,” Mosseri said. Mosseri defended Meta’s efforts to protect teenagers and expressed opposition to what he saw as the use of certain snippets of information out of context. “I think parents want to have good information about services, risks, etc. That’s different than journalists or lawyers taking little snippets of much larger documents and focusing on them in things like articles and lawsuits,” she said. In this case, the stakes are high for Meta, the market leader and one of the most profitable social media companies in the world. An initial estimate of possible sanctions amounts to $1.4 trillion, roughly the total value of Meta’s shares on the Nasdaq. Some legal experts compare this moment to landmark litigation against tobacco companies in the 1990s that forced them to reach big settlements and change their behavior, and to the public discussion about the risks of cigarettes. Mosseri is expected to continue on the stand again Wednesday. The trial is expected to last about five more weeks.
