Meta Platforms faces intensifying legal scrutiny over its handling of teenage users' data and time spent on Instagram, with court proceedings exposing significant gaps between the company's public safety promises and internal realities. The social media giant is defending itself against a coalition of 29 US states alleging it deliberately engineered its products to captivate young users while harvesting their personal information and deceiving the public about the risks. The case entered its second week on August 24 and is scheduled to continue through late September, with testimony painting a troubling picture of safety features that generated positive headlines but saw minimal real-world adoption.
Adam Mosseri, Instagram's chief executive, came under scrutiny regarding two key protection tools: Take a Break, launched in 2021 to send reminders encouraging users to pause their scrolling, and Quiet Mode, introduced in 2023 to silence notifications during late hours. During cross-examination by Jason Slothouber, a lawyer representing Colorado's Attorney General, Mosseri was forced to acknowledge that adoption of these features remained disappointingly low. Rather than confirm the statistics, Mosseri attempted to reframe the issue, claiming that improvement had occurred since the initial rollout period. Yet this assertion seemed hollow when confronted with internal company data revealing the true scope of the problem.
The disconnect between Meta's public messaging and actual usage becomes particularly striking when examining the timing of announcements. One day before testifying at a Congressional hearing on December 8, 2021, about social media's harmful effects on young people, Mosseri authored a Meta blog post touting new safety features for teenagers. The post highlighted that early testing showed over 90 per cent of teens kept reminder features enabled once activated. However, this statistic proved misleading—it measured only the retention rate among those who had already turned on the feature, not the overall adoption rate among Instagram's teen user base. This semantic distinction glossed over a crucial reality: virtually no teenagers were using these tools in the first place.
Internal Meta documents presented to jurors on August 25 provided damning specificity about adoption failures. Take a Break achieved only a 1.8 per cent adoption rate among teenage users, while Quiet Mode reached 8.7 per cent. These figures fundamentally undermined Meta's public positioning as a company committed to teen wellbeing. When questioned about these numbers, Francesco Fogu, Meta's director of product design at Instagram, admitted he was unaware of the precise data but conceded that the company recognised adoption rates would plummet if the safety tools were not activated by default in user accounts. This acknowledgement suggested that Meta understood its voluntary safety measures would fail without coercive implementation—yet chose not to make them default settings initially.
The reason for this reluctance became apparent through further testimony. Activating safety features by default, particularly Quiet Mode for younger teenagers, would have produced what Fogu and other witnesses characterised as a "notable negative impact" on user engagement. Meta's business model depends fundamentally on advertising revenue generated by maximising the time users spend within its ecosystem. The longer teenagers remain on Instagram, the more data the platform collects and the more advertisements it can display to them. From this commercial perspective, protecting teen wellbeing and maximising teenage engagement represent conflicting objectives, and Meta apparently chose engagement over protection.
George Volichenko, a former data scientist who worked on Instagram's safety initiatives during 2022 and 2023, characterised the adoption figures as "very low and disappointing," describing them as merely "a drop in the ocean" relative to Instagram's overall teenage user population. Volichenko testified that Meta's leadership demonstrated little genuine interest in substantially increasing the usage of these protective features. The company's priorities became transparent: safety tools served primarily a public relations function, generating favourable headlines and Congressional testimony while remaining inaccessible to most teenage users. This arrangement allowed Meta to claim it was addressing concerns while continuing its core business practices uninterrupted.
Arturo Bejar, formerly an engineering director at Meta, offered particularly blunt assessment during the previous week's testimony, characterising Take a Break as "a feature that's designed to fail." His observation struck at the heart of the case: Meta allegedly engineered its safety mechanisms to perform poorly, allowing the company to maintain the appearance of responsibility without sacrificing engagement metrics. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will ultimately decide the case with the jury's verdict as guidance, appeared visibly astonished that product design leadership claimed ignorance of their own adoption data, suggesting even the judiciary recognised the implausibility of such claims.
When questioned directly about whether Meta had disclosed adoption rates to the public, Mosseri admitted the company had not. The adoption percentages were simply absent from public statements, Congressional testimony, and blog posts promoting these features. Only when pressed in court did Meta acknowledge that Take a Break and Quiet Mode had essentially failed to gain traction among teenagers. Mosseri offered a partial defense, noting that Meta subsequently incorporated these safety tools into Teen Accounts launched in 2024, which include parental controls and activate safety features by default. However, he could not specify what percentage of eligible teen accounts actually activated parental controls, suggesting the same pattern of disappointing adoption might be repeating.
The stakes for Meta extend far beyond reputational damage. Should the 29 US states succeed in their case, they are seeking penalties totalling approximately US$200 billion (RM805.46 billion). Beyond financial consequences, an adverse judgment could mandate fundamental restructuring of Meta's business model, forcing the company to prioritise user safety and wellbeing above engagement and advertising revenue. Such an outcome would reverberate throughout the technology industry, establishing precedent that platforms cannot simultaneously maximize user addiction and claim commitment to protecting vulnerable populations.
For Malaysian observers and Southeast Asian stakeholders, this case carries particular significance. Meta's Instagram maintains enormous influence across the region, with millions of teenagers accessing the platform daily. The court proceedings demonstrate how global technology giants operate with different standards and commitments depending on regulatory pressure and litigation risk. If the United States successfully compels Meta to implement meaningful protections for teenagers, these changes would likely extend to international markets including Malaysia, fundamentally altering how the platform operates regionally. Conversely, should Meta prevail, it would reinforce the current model where corporate interests consistently outweigh young users' protection, with minimal transparency about how engagement-driven design affects teenage development and wellbeing.
