Meta’s Shame

In a huge revelation this week, a federal court unsealed a brief filed by plaintiffs in a major lawsuit against social media companies, most prominently Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The details of this filing were staggeringly terrible.

For example, Instagram’s former head of safety Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that she was shocked to learn in 2020 that Instagram had a ’17-strike’ policy for accounts that solicited sex or prostitution, including trafficking. In other words, an account could go around asking for sex over a dozen times, including possibly of minors, without being suspended.

That’s gross and disturbing.

It doesn’t stop there. According to the plaintiffs, Meta was aware that millions of adults were contacting minors on its sites, that its products were making adolescents anxious or depressed, and had done the math on what changes would mean for ‘engagement’ and decided that it wasn’t worth it to address the concerns. For example, there was not a way for users to easily report child sexual abuse content, while they could do so for ‘spam’ or an ‘intellectual property violation.’ Indeed, multiple employees suggested ways to reduce harms to younger users only to be blocked by senior management.

The brief is supposedly based on sworn depositions of current and former Meta employees as well as documents obtained during the lawsuit’s discovery process.

According to the brief, in 2019 Meta designed a ‘deactivation study’ which found that users who stopped using Instagram or Facebook became happier after a week. This is consistent with research done by other academics. Meta halted the study and didn’t publicly disclose the results. One employee worried, “Is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info for themselves?” The following year, Meta answered ‘No’ to the question posed by the Senate Judiciary Committee whether it was ‘able to determine whether increased use of its platform among teenage girls has any correlation with increased signs of depression.’

Yeah, I think they did know.

This has come to light in part due to the success of Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation”, which has highlighted the destructiveness of social media on adolescents and gotten smartphones out of schools in dozens of states. The data has been clear for a number of years; I remember first becoming alarmed about social media’s effect on teenagers while reading Jean Twenge’s book ‘iGen’ in 2018.

Meta is a super-data-driven organization. I bet someone there could tell me how much they spent on paperclips last year. If social scientists like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt could identify what its products were doing to teenage girls’ psyches from the outside looking in, Meta clearly knew. When I spent time in Silicon Valley for the past 10 years, many of the parents wouldn’t let their kids near social media. They knew what the products were doing to children’s malleable minds.

If only they had thought to tell the rest of us. Or better yet, done something about it.

This lawsuit is likely only the beginning of what’s to come for Meta, TikTok and the social media companies. If this lawsuit is successful, I’d expect Congressional action to follow.

These companies are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars on the back of maximizing engagement. In some ways, it’s not a surprise that when given a choice between mitigating harm and revving up user engagement, they chose the latter. We will be dealing with the repercussions for generations. For some families, it’s a little too late.

To get off your phone more, check out Noble Mobile - email matt@noblemobile.com and use my name if you want a few months for free. Offline’s IRL no-phones party is coming to Boston, Baltimore, and back to NYC. To help reform social media, check out Center for Humane Technology. Remember to look up.