Instagram head Adam Mosseri took the stand Tuesday in a major trial pitting Meta against attorneys general from dozens of states over social media addiction and children's privacy.
During his testimony, Mosseri said it was "news to me" that Instagram employees had been told by a company lawyer to restrict the data they shared with him as part of their work on teen safety. The trial is centered on claims that Meta intentionally tried to hook children onto its platforms despite internal research showing its apps were harming young users.
One piece of internal research that emerged during testimony was a 2023 slide deck prepared by Instagram designers and others focused on teen safety on the app. According to reporting by Engadget, the deck showed that content related to suicide, self-injury, and eating disorders had a disproportionately large teen audience that was two and a half times bigger for teens than adults. It also showed that content deemed not recommendable to teens was being viewed by teens at a rate 1.5 times higher than adults.
Messages shown during the trial revealed that a lawyer for the company then told Instagram employees to remove those statistics in order to limit Mosseri's exposure to the information. On the stand, Mosseri said he had never participated in a conversation about moderating his own access to information. "I'm not a legal expert, so I'm not sure what the reasons might be for removing information from presentations before they get to me, but [I'm] not trying to encourage my team to hide anything," he said. "I think that my understanding is if there are legal implications of certain work, that lawyers review the material."
He described the lawyers' role as ensuring the accuracy of documents and that "they make sense, particularly when it's about whether or not something we're doing complies with the law."
Mosseri's comments came after Instagram's Director of Product Design, Francesco Fogu, testified about the July 2023 presentation and the conversations around what statistics to include in it. Fogu said he was "surprised" because he had never before been told to "hide data from leadership." He was ultimately permitted to communicate the data to Instagram's leaders vocally, he said, and added that the data was still accessible to executives because it was detailed in reports linked within the presentation.
During cross-examination from Meta's lawyer, Fogu said the presentation was ultimately successful because it was the "catalyst" for the creation of Instagram's teen accounts feature.
The trial is the latest legal confrontation between Meta and state officials over how the company manages underage users on its platforms. Mosseri is the first high-profile executive to testify in this proceeding.
