August 24, 2026, 23:47 GMT | Insight A former Instagram employee who worked on teen-safety tools told a US jury in California Monday that he quit Meta Platforms in 2023 after concluding his team existed partly to protect the company from litigation, rather than solely to protect teens.

George Volichenko, who had worked at Facebook from 2016 to 2018, returned to Meta in 2022 to help develop Instagram tools such as “Take a Break” and “Quiet Mode,” designed to discourage teens from using the app excessively.

“I came to work for Meta the second time to kind of make a difference,” Volichenko testified as a trial over addictive-design claims brought by 29 state attorneys general entered its second week in Oakland, California. “I saw how much excessive use of social media affected people around me, and I wanted to do something about it.”

Volichenko left about 11 months later, believing Meta was prioritizing growth among teenage Instagram users over their safety, in part by refusing to activate teen safety tools by default.

“I was not happy with the limited freedom the team was given to actually design and test and launch features that were actually moving the needle on helping teens,” Volichenko said during direct examination by Megan O’Neill of the California attorney general’s office.

“I didn’t feel the company at large was aligned with my values,” he said. “I was contributing to something that I didn’t feel was positive for society, and so I just quit.”

Volichenko, who testified under a subpoena from the states, appeared nervous but resolute on the witness stand. He has not testified in the other addictive-design trials Meta has faced this year.

Instagram’s “Take a Break” feature, which prompts teens to stop scrolling after a set period, was used by only two or three of every 1,000 regular teenage Instagram users, Volichenko testified. He called that adoption rate “almost negligible” and “a drop in the ocean.”

“I would say it’s very low, and if we made something that was truly impactful and effective, it would be a lot higher,” he said of adoption rates as low as 0.165% of teenage Instagram users. “From my perspective, no, it was not a success. The primary thing it was supposed to address was not moved in any material manner.”

Volichenko said the wellbeing team could not persuade Meta’s leadership to activate features such as “Take a Break” by default for teenage accounts. Team members narrowed their proposal to cover only the youngest users when they joined Instagram at age 13, believing it was unrealistic to seek default activation for all teens.

Even that limited proposal failed to gain approval, he said.

“There was a lot of fear that we might see large declines in these core metrics” measuring Instagram’s audience, Volichenko testified. “If that happens, multiple levels of leadership will have to report it up and explain why they are kind of tanking these metrics.”

In previous trials, Meta has cited tools such as “Take a Break” as evidence that it has taken concrete steps to protect teens from excessive use (see here and here). But the Tennessee attorney general and other plaintiffs have introduced evidence showing that few teens used the tools (see here).

Volichenko, now a mechanical-engineering student at San Francisco State University, told the eight-member jury that his manager confirmed his concern that the safety tools were subordinate to Meta’s growth goals.

“He said I shouldn’t worry too much about the adoption figures being low and the effectiveness number being low, because the team existed partially to protect the company against the upcoming lawsuits,” Volichenko testified.

He left Instagram soon afterward, in early 2023 — about eight months before more than 40 states filed multistate and individual lawsuits against Meta in October 2023 (see here).

“My experience reinforced what was told to me in that conversation, because everything I saw was supporting that,” he said. “The limited agency we had to make a difference . . . the feedback we were getting from leadership, the guidance from leadership, made that opinion even stronger.”

Volichenko also testified that Meta routinely labeled sensitive internal communications as protected by attorney-client privilege, including “essentially anything that we wouldn’t want the public to see.”

During proceedings outside the jury’s presence, the states have accused Meta of improperly invoking privilege to withhold evidence they are entitled to obtain. Meta’s lawyers have told US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers the company has done nothing wrong.

Volichenko is due to return to the witness stand Tuesday morning for the resumption of his cross-examination by Meta lawyer Brian Stekloff (see here). Before court adjourned Monday, Stekloff established that Volichenko had worked for a succession of technology companies, including Strava and Calm, and had rarely remained at one company for more than two years.

Earlier Monday, the jury heard from Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychologist appearing as an expert witness for the states. Twenge defended her conclusion that the “totality of the evidence” establishes a “clear causal path” from heavy social-media use to mental-health problems among teens.

Twenge spent most of the first half of the day parrying a lengthy and aggressive cross-examination by Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt. He pressed her to acknowledge that her peer-reviewed research, unlike her paid-expert testimony for the states, had not reached the same definitive conclusion about causation.

On direct examination, Twenge testified that correlational and experimental studies can support an inference that using social media for more than an hour a day increases teens’ risk of depression, anxiety, unhappiness, self-harm and suicide.

“My overall assessment of the correlational assessments — and there are many — is the more hours a day a teen uses social media, the more likely it is they are depressed, anxious, to engage in self-harm, to be unhappy, and so on,” she told the jury.

Questioned by Chris Lewis of the Kentucky attorney general’s office, Twenge presented a series of charts showing changes between 2012 and 2019, when smartphones and social-media apps became central to teenage life in the US. The charts showed a significant increase in suicide rates, particularly among boys; rising rates of clinical depression, particularly among girls; and a growing share of teens failing to get adequate sleep while using social media at night.

Twenge said it would be unethical to conduct an experiment in which researchers deliberately increased teens’ social-media use to determine whether it caused psychological harm. But she said researchers could infer causation by applying the nine Bradford Hill criteria, a framework used to assess possible causal relationships when controlled experimental data are unavailable.

“The totality of the evidence demonstrates a clear causal path from social media use to low psychological wellbeing in adolescents,” Twenge testified.

Her cross-examination lasted more than twice as long as her direct testimony. Schmidt sought to undermine her conclusion that the risk of mental-health harm rises as teens spend more time on social media.

Twenge also appeared as an expert witness for New Mexico in its trial against Meta (see here). Under questioning from Schmidt, she confirmed Monday that she had earned more than $500,000 over the past five years as an expert for plaintiffs suing social-media companies.

Twenge also acknowledged that her conclusions concerned social media generally and could not be attributed specifically to Facebook or Instagram. She had not conducted a Bradford Hill analysis before serving as an expert for the states, she acknowledged, and admitted that she had not published an academic paper stating the same definitive causal conclusion contained in her report for the trial, she said.

Other papers do not “use that exact language,” Twenge said, but employ “language that is similar.”

Schmidt also challenged Twenge’s assertion that the risk of mental-health harm for teens increases with the amount of time they spend on social media. He focused on one of her charts, which showed a sharp rise in unhappiness among teens using social media for two to five hours a day.

But the same chart showed that teenage boys who did not use social media at all reported greater unhappiness than boys who used it for as many as five hours a day. Twenge's charge showed that unhappiness among teenage girls did not begin rising significantly until two hours of daily use.

“Beyond an hour a day, that’s when you start to see an increase in risk” of mental-health harm, Twenge said, adding that the effect varies by gender and age.

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