Instagram chief takes the stand in a trial pitting Meta against states
over social media harms
[August 26, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive at the helm of
Instagram, defended the platform's safety record in testimony Tuesday
and took issue with a plaintiff attorney's emphasis on low usage numbers
for a feature designed to encourage young users to take breaks.
Mosseri was appearing at a trial that pits Meta against the states of
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which accuse the social
media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by
knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to
its platforms.
Jason Slothouber, a senior prosecutor for the Colorado Attorney
General’s Office, pressed Mosseri on the low adoption rate among teens
for the “take a break” feature, which prompts users to step away if
they’ve been scrolling a while. Very few teens used the feature when
Instagram first introduced it, but since launching separate teen
accounts in 2024, Meta has made it the default setting for teenage
users.
Mosseri appeared frustrated that Slothouber was focusing on a single
Instagram safety feature when the Meta executive said, “There are many
features we launch over many aspects of safety and well-being” that the
company tries to improve over time.
The trial began last week in federal court in Oakland, California, and
is expected to last about six weeks. The four states were among 29 that
sued the tech giant in 2023 over child safety and privacy — the other 25
will go to trial later. The company also faces lawsuits in state courts,
including one underway in Tennessee.
Mosseri, who has led Instagram since 2018, testified for about an hour
and is due back on the stand Wednesday. He also testified earlier this
year in the Los Angeles state court trial that pitted Meta and YouTube
against a 20-year-old plaintiff identified only by the initials “KGM,”
who said she became addicted to social media as a child. Meta and Google
were found liable for harms caused by their platforms, and KGM was
awarded a total of $6 million.
In earlier testimony at the Oakland trial, Francesco Fogu, Instagram's
director of product design, had contentious exchanges with the
plaintiffs' lawyer over internal chats and documents shown to the jury.
In one instance, jurors were shown a passage from a document saying, “As
a company, we make different choices when it comes to regulatory
response. Sometimes we don’t comply and accept a fine. Sometimes we
comply in the most minimal or literal way possible.”
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Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, arrives in court to testify in a
landmark social media case that seeks to hold tech companies
responsible for harms to children, in Los Angeles, Feb. 11, 2026.
(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
 Fogu said several times he did not
remember whether he wrote those words. As Slothouber kept pressing,
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stepped in to say, “We get the point."
Jurors also heard from former Meta employee George Volichenko, who
worked in marketing analytics and as a data scientist from 2016 to
2018 and from 2022 to 2023. During his second stint at the company,
when he worked on Instagram's mental well-being team, Volichenko
said he was told the team exists primarily to protect the company in
upcoming lawsuits.
In his experience, Volichenko said, “Everything I saw was kind of
supporting that” — from having limited agency to feedback and
guidance from leadership.
Discussing Instagram's “take a break” feature, Volichenko said his
team had argued it should be automatically turned on for younger
teens who use Instagram. That's because people are far more likely
to use a feature if it is “opt-out” — that is, they need to manually
turn it off if they don't want to use it — rather than “opt-in,”
which means they have to manually turn it on.
They did not get the approval.
“The tradeoff to core metrics was not desirable,” Volichenko said,
referring to Meta's metrics for how long and how often people use
its products.
He soon left Meta a second time.
“I didn’t feel like the company at large was aligned with my
values,” he said.
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