Adam Mosseri, chief of Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Instagram, will be grilled by the Senate in December, his first time in that particular hot seat.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal will lead the hearing, in which a bipartisan panel will ask the Instagram boss questions about the safety of the app for children. This matter has become a cause célèbre since in a series of leaks this fall seemed to suggest that Meta was aware that the app hurt the mental health of the young but it ignored the research.

“After bombshell reports about Instagram’s toxic impacts, we want to hear straight from the company’s leadership why it uses powerful algorithms that push poisonous content to children driving them down rabbit holes to dark places, and what it will do to make its platform safer,” Blumenthal said in a statement to CNN Business.

Mosseri (pictured) will be the most high-profile person so far at Meta to talk about the matter in such a context. Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, testified already in September in front of senators who compared Instagram to smoking in terms of its addictive and harmful properties.

Later, the whistleblower that leaked the original documents, former Facebook Inc. employee Frances Haugen, also went in front of Congress and reiterated that she believes the company puts profits before safety. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen had said. “Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

That’s what Mosseri will have to contend with when he has his turn in the chair. Blumenthal said in October, after inviting Mosseri to talk in front of Congress, that parents and children in the U.S. deserve some answers after being “disturbed” by the reports.

Mosseri himself took to Twitter this morning, expressing in a video that he was looking forward to talking about the matter. He said it was his responsibility to ensure kids are safe on the app and talked about a number of safety features the company has invested in. “You’re going to hear more from us about safety, not only at Instagram but at Meta more broadly,” he said.

Photo: Twitter