George Volichenko
George Volichenko is a data scientist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who currently serves as a senior data scientist at Stratus Data, a data analytics consulting firm. He previously worked at Meta in two stints, first as a product marketing analyst at Facebook from 2016 to 2018 and later as a data scientist on Instagram's teen mental well-being team from 2022 to 2023. He is best known for his testimony in a 2025 trial pitting Meta against states over social media harms, where he stated that adoption rates for Instagram's teen safety features were extremely low and that leadership declined to make them opt-out by default due to concerns about negative impacts on core engagement metrics.
“George Volichenko, former Meta scientist, testified that "fewer than 0.2% of teens used Instagram's early 'Take a Break' tool" and that "company leaders showed little interest in expanding safety features that might hurt engagement"”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.