If you’re in charge of a social media platform like Instagram, what would it mean to “stall” the rollout of a safety feature aimed at getting users to pause their use of your product? After all, reduced to the bluntest possible terms, telling users to look away from the ads that drive your revenue is, in theory, the opposite of good business, and that’s what Instagram’s Take a Break feature essentially does. The safety-minded may build and even implement a feature, but the bottom-line minded might hesitate to foist such a feature on users who don’t actively ask for it.
But life doesn’t reduce things to the bluntest terms, and at trial on Tuesday, according to Reuters, Instagram head Adam Mosseri “denied any suggestion by U.S. states suing Meta that Instagram stalled” by not immediately making Take a Break a default Instagram feature for teens. It eventually did, about two years ago, which was about three years after the feature first debuted.
The trial concerns whether Instagram and Facebook were designed to be addictive to children. The suit was brought by the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, and is playing out in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Meta, which is worth about $1.5 trillion, says the penalties laid out in the suit could cost the company up to $1.4 trillion—total financial ruin in other words. So a lot is at stake.
The Take a Break feature originally came out in December of 2021. In a blog post at the time, Mosseri wrote that Instagram was working on ways to “keep young people safe on the app,” including, “launching the Take a Break feature.” Instagram’s own experiments, he wrote, “show that once teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them on.”
But, according to Business Insider, Mosseri explained that “Most people don’t turn it on, but I don’t think we knew that yet because this was still under development.” Instagram, he said, has “had to make a lot of changes over the last few years in order to have it be more adopted.”
Adoption, he said according to Insider, ”started very low.” Then the company “started trying to do those notifications, encouraging teens to turn it on themselves.” This “helped,” Mosseri said, ”but not nearly as much as we had hoped. And then we eventually made it on by default as part of Teen Accounts.”
“Most teens didn’t want it,” but Instagram “decided to push forward with it anyway,” Mosseri said according to Reuters.
In Meta’s opening statement a week ago, Meta attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the plaintiffs’ case cherrypicks from internal documents and misrepresenting Meta’s policies, and that the case doesn’t demonstrate clear harm caused by Meta’s platforms.
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