Testifying in a landmark bellwether trial, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri told a federal court on Tuesday that the company has found no simple way to stop harming children without turning off the specific algorithms engineered to do so.
Addressing a coalition of state attorneys general who claim Meta deliberately deployed addictive features to hook young users, Mosseri cautioned that implementing genuine safety measures would require a devastating dismantling of the company's core product roadmap. The executive noted that while Meta remains deeply committed to youth well-being, the platform’s foundational architecture was built on first principles of compulsive behavioral modification, making it mathematically impossible to deploy a silver bullet that cures the addiction without also curing the engagement metrics.
Mosseri spent several hours walking the plaintiffs through the technical realities of operating a multibillion-dollar attention market at scale. He explained that removing features like infinite scroll, variable reward notifications, and algorithmic social-comparison amplification would not just be a breaking change for the app’s code base, but would effectively deprecate the company's primary mechanism for generating revenue.
We have tasked our brightest developers with finding a way to safely extract monetizable despair from high schoolers, but every prototype either fails to ruin their self-esteem or fails to serve ads.
At press time, Meta legal representatives had submitted a proposed compromise to the court, offering to introduce a mandatory screen-time warning that nudges teenagers to take a break from their devices immediately before sending them a push notification implying their friends are hanging out without them.