Top Meta staff allegedly compared Instagram to a drug and worked for years to obscure the social media platform’s potential dangers from parents and children, even as they appeared to acknowledge their technology was harmful, according to newly unsealed internal communications cited in a court filing.
See also Reuter's reporting on the lawsuit:
Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
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The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege:
Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth.
Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold."
Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway.
Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to act.
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In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Nick Clegg, Meta's then-head of global public policy, to better fund child safety work.
I might not want to live in Meta's metaverse...