Adam Mosseri, the designer who ended up defending Instagram under oath

Adam Mosseri

Photo: TechCrunch / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 23, 1983 New York City
Occupation	Businessperson

Adam Mosseri runs one of the most used pieces of software on the planet, and a growing share of his job consists of explaining what it is not. Instagram is not, he told a jury in Los Angeles, clinically addictive. He is not, he told a federal court in Oakland, encouraging his team to hide anything. The head of Instagram trained as a designer, a profession built on making things easier to use, and he now spends his public life defending a product that critics, prosecutors and lawmakers say is too easy to use. The distance between those two jobs is the story of his career.

He is a New Yorker by birth, the son of an Egyptian-Israeli Jewish father who worked as a psychotherapist and an Irish Catholic mother who was an architect, and he grew up in Chappaqua, north of the city, where he went to Horace Greeley High School. His younger brother, Emile Mosseri, became a film composer and earned an Academy Award nomination for his score for Minari.

At New York University he enrolled in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and graduated in 2005, at 22, with a degree in information design. In 2003, still a student, he had started a design consultancy, Blank Mosseri, with offices in New York and San Francisco. In 2007 he became the first designer at the video-chat start-up TokBox.

Facebook hired him as a product designer in 2008. By 2012 he was design director for the company’s mobile apps. From 2012 to 2016 he oversaw News Feed, the ranked stream at the centre of the app. Not everything worked. He also oversaw Facebook Home, a 2013 attempt to take over the home screen of Android phones that never caught on.

After the 2016 American presidential election, when the feed was blamed for spreading fabricated stories, Mosseri volunteered to be the company’s spokesman on what was then called fake news, and during the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 he was one of the few Facebook executives willing to speak at length about the company’s responsibility. In May 2018 he moved to Instagram as vice president of product. Four months later its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, resigned, and on October 1, 2018, Facebook named Mosseri head of Instagram. The title was deliberate: the company reserved the word CEO for founders.

His tenure has been an argument about what Instagram is for. In July 2021 he recorded a video declaring that it was “no longer a photo-sharing app” and laid out a pivot toward video, creators, shopping and messaging, which in practice meant Reels and a race with TikTok. A year later Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian shared a post demanding that the company “Make Instagram Instagram Again”. Mosseri defended the direction in a video of his own, then phased out some of the changes, including a full-screen feed that had been in testing. The pivot itself stayed. When Instagram announced three billion monthly users in September 2025, he credited Reels, direct messages and recommendations for most of the growth.

Threads, the text app his team built to take on Twitter, opened in July 2023 and passed 100 million sign-ups in five days. In July 2025 Meta named Connor Hayes head of Threads, reporting to Mosseri. In January 2025, as TikTok’s sister apps disappeared from American app stores, he announced Edits, a video editor for creators that reviewers compared directly with CapCut; it launched that April.

The harder question has always been teenagers. In September 2021, after The Wall Street Journal published internal research suggesting Instagram made some teenage girls feel worse about their bodies, Mosseri paused Instagram Kids, a planned version for children under 13. That December he sat before a Senate subcommittee for more than two hours, rejected the description of Instagram as addictive and said the leaked research had been misread. The senators were unimpressed by his offer of self-regulation. The safety tools that followed, including Teen Accounts, private by default since 2024, have tended to arrive under pressure rather than ahead of it, and the contradiction at the centre of his position has never gone away: the company sells advertising, and the advertising depends on time spent on the app.

That contradiction reached a courtroom in February 2026. Called as an adverse witness in a California bellwether case brought by a young woman identified as K.G.M., who said Instagram and YouTube had harmed her as a child, Mosseri was shown a podcast from March 2020 in which he had said there is such a thing as being addicted to a social media platform. “Clearly, I wasn’t careful with my words during that podcast,” he told the jury. He distinguished “problematic use” from clinical addiction and disclosed that he had received more than $45 million in compensation since joining the company in 2008. In March the jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages, most of it owed by Meta, which said it disagreed with the verdict.

In August he was the only senior Meta executive to take the stand in the federal trial brought by a coalition of state attorneys general in Oakland. “I’m not trying to encourage my team to hide anything,” he said, while acknowledging that access to internal research had been restricted after the Frances Haugen leaks. The next day Meta settled. State attorneys general valued the agreement at about $17 billion, paid over ten years, and it commits the company to daily time limits and night-time blocks for teenagers, stronger age checks, no push notifications during school hours and an independent auditor.

Mosseri’s public voice has changed less than his circumstances. He still answers questions from users in weekly videos and Stories, and in October 2026 he used one to rule out a dating product. In a memo at the end of 2025 he warned that “authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible” because of generative AI, and suggested that camera makers should sign images cryptographically at the moment of capture. In Australia in September 2026, as the government proposed letting users opt out of algorithmic feeds, he said that on a chronological feed “the average user experience gets much worse”, with engagement falling by as much as half.

He is married to Monica Mosseri, and they have three sons. The family lived in London and moved back to California in 2023.

The settlement’s changes are due within months, and an outside auditor will judge whether they work. Lawsuits from families and school districts are still moving through the courts. The next phase of Mosseri’s career will test whether the app he was hired to grow can be rebuilt to be used less, and still be the business he runs.

Tags: business, ceos, Mark Zuckerberg, instagram, facebook, tech executives, Adam Mosseri, Threads