Instagram’s head said the company has spent years trying to convince teens “take a break.”
Adam Mosseri testified on the witness stand Tuesday in Meta’s social media addiction In a trial in Oakland, relatively few teens initially opted for “Take a Break,” a wellness feature designed to encourage users to leave the app after a certain amount of scrolling.
“Most people don’t turn it on, but I don’t think we knew that yet because this was still in development,” Mosseri told the jury. “We actually found that a lot of people don’t turn it on, and we’ve had to make a lot of changes over the last few years to get it more accepted. This was in 2021.”
Mosseri said Instagram first tried showing teen notifications encouraging them to activate the reminders. The strategy delivered some improvement, he said, but fell well short of the company’s expectations.
“It started really low. We tried to make those notifications and encourage teens to turn it on themselves,” Mosseri said. ‘That helped, but not nearly as much as we had hoped. And eventually we started working with it as part of standard Teen accounts.”
A coalition of attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, has accused Meta of exploitation young users to make a profit by designing its platforms to keep them hooked. The states also claim that Meta violated children’s rights privacy protection and misled the public about the security of the platforms.
Tuesday’s testimony also raised questions about how Instagram publicly presented Take a Break’s performance.
An internal meta-document shown during testimony said 2021 adoption was “modest at 1.8%.” According to Instagram’s public blog post in December 2021, 90% of teens who enabled Take a Break kept it on, not including the statistic that only 1.8% had enabled the feature in the first place.
“Initial test results show that once teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them,” Instagram wrote at the time.
When asked if the public post showed adoption was low, Mosseri said, “No, because we planned to repeat it and try to increase that number over time, which we did.”
“My expectation is that we’re going to raise awareness and get the teens who want the position to turn it on,” Mosseri said. “It turned out that most teenagers didn’t want it. We decided to go ahead with it anyway.”
