Apps may keep giving us tools to break our addiction to them, but teens aren't using them

Are smartphones our best friends, or our worst enemies? Sometimes it feels like half the work companies are putting into new features are attempts to fix our addiction to others, like with the new Pause Point on Pixel 11 devices — or really anything Digital Wellbeing, for that matter. And while we seem to keep getting more and more new tools meant to save us from ourselves, are the most vulnerable people even using them? According to Meta, maybe not so much.

Meta’s currently being sued by 29 states over claims of safety and privacy issues impacting its youngest users, and Bloomberg is sharing some of the details just revealed by a former Meta data scientist’s testimony.

Back in 2021, Instagram introduced its Take a Break feature: a tool designed to gently remind users when they’ve been interacting with the app for maybe a little too long, and suggest they briefly give it a rest. Tools like this sound like exactly the sort of thing parents wish their teens were taking advantage of to curb addictive app behavior — but are they?

According to that data scientist, not so much. Despite Meta earlier claiming that some 90% of teens who use tools like Take a Break keep them turned on, internal figures later showed that only between 0.165% and 0.2% of teens actually took proper advantage of Take a Break. While at that time Take a Break was still opt-in, it’s now on by default for teen accounts.

Considering just how many users Meta has, the company’s attorneys attempted to argue that even those tiny fractions still represent hundreds of thousands of teens. And while that may well be true, it’s impossible to ignore just how many of them seem to be choosing to use the platform without its full suite of safeguards in place.

You know what the old adage says: You can lead a teen to behavior-correcting software tools, but you can’t make them click.