Meta Rejected Making Instagram Teen Safety Defaults Strict Over Engagement Fears, Jury Hears

A former Meta data scientist testified in an Oakland federal courtroom that Instagram leadership declined to enable a teen mental health safety feature by default because executive management feared hurting key user engagement metrics. George Volichenko told a jury that internal proposals to make Instagram's "Take a Break" feature an automatic setting were turned down due to executive concerns over audience loss, according to trial reporting highlighted by The Next Web.

Volichenko, who worked within Instagram's mental wellbeing team from April 2022 until February 2023, was tasked with measuring usage of the tool, which prompts users to take a 10-minute pause after continuous scrolling. His team found that fewer than two in every 1,000 weekly teenage users—or between 0.165% and 0.2%—actively turned on the feature and took a break. While Instagram head Adam Mosseri had stated in a 2021 blog post that over 90% of teens kept the reminders active once set, Volichenko noted that the statistic masked the reality that almost no teenagers opted in initially.

Internal efforts to transition the break reminders to an opt-out default setting were ultimately rejected over potential metric trade-offs, Volichenko testified. He explained that leadership feared significant drops in user engagement, which would have forced multiple tiers of management to explain declining metrics to superiors. Under oath, Volichenko also testified that Meta routinely applied attorney-client privilege labels to internal materials to shield sensitive company information from public view.

When Volichenko raised concerns about the tool's negligible adoption rate internally, colleagues informed him that the wellbeing division existed in part to defend Meta against impending litigation, and his manager instructed him to frame the findings as feature enhancements. During cross-examination, Meta defense attorney Brian Stekloff noted that a 0.2% adoption rate still represented hundreds of thousands of teenagers, a point Volichenko conceded while asserting that Instagram set insufficiently ambitious targets for teen safety.

The testimony forms part of an ongoing lawsuit brought against Meta by state attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The states allege that Meta breached the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and issued deceptive statements regarding the addictive nature of its applications. Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers clarified from the bench that the trial centers specifically on whether Meta made misrepresentations about platform addictiveness, rather than on third-party platform content shielded under Section 230.

Former Meta engineer Arturo Bejar, who served as the prosecution's opening witness, previously testified that the opt-in break feature was engineered to fail, comparing the design to requiring drivers to manually enable an airbag every time they enter a vehicle. While Meta subsequently launched default Teen Accounts with built-in usage restrictions—reporting that 97% of users aged 13 to 15 retain the default settings—prosecutors are focusing on historical statements made while the opt-in structure was in place.

The proceeding, *People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms Inc.*, opened on August 17 and is scheduled to run six to eight weeks. An eight-person advisory jury will submit findings to Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide the outcome and determine potential penalties, which could reach $200 billion alongside injunctive changes to Meta's teen platform operations. Following Volichenko's cross-examination, Instagram director of product design Francesco Fogu was called to the stand, with Mosseri expected to testify later in the proceedings.