Meta Accused of Covering Up Social Media Damage
Synopsis
Meta shut off internal research after finding Facebook harmed users' mental health, according to lawsuit filings by US school districts. Project Mercury study found people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower depression, anxiety and loneliness. Company stopped further work and said findings were tainted by media narrative. Internal staffer said Nielsen study showed causal impact. Lawsuit also alleges Meta designed ineffective youth safety features, requiring 17 violations before removing sex traffickers from the platform.
Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding proof that its products harmed users' mental health. Unredacted filings in a lawsuit by US school districts against Meta and other social media platforms said this. In a 2020 research project named Project Mercury, Meta scientists teamed up with survey firm Nielsen. They wanted to measure the effect of stopping use of Facebook. Meta documents obtained through discovery showed this.
Study Found People Felt Better Without Facebook
To the company's disappointment, people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison, internal documents said. Rather than publishing those findings or doing more research, the filing states, Meta stopped further work. The company said internally that the negative study findings were tainted by the existing media narrative around the company.
Privately, however, a staffer said the conclusions of the research were valid. The filing showed this. The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison with an unhappy face emoji, an unnamed staff researcher wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be like the tobacco industry doing research and knowing cigarettes were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.
Company Told Congress It Could Not Measure Harm
The filing says that even after its internal research that shows a connection between its products and adverse mental health effects, Meta informed Congress that it could not assess whether its products were harmful to teenage girls. On Saturday, in a statement, Meta representative Andy Stone stated that the study was abandoned due to the faultiness of its methods. He mentioned that the company puts a lot of effort into making its products safe.
The full record will show that for over a decade, we've listened to parents, researched issues that matter most and made real changes to protect teens, he said. The claim of Meta burying evidence of social media harms is just one of many in a late Friday filing by Motley Rice. This is a law firm suing Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat on behalf of school districts around the country. Broadly, the people bringing the lawsuit argue the companies have purposely hidden the internally recognized risks of their products from users, parents and teachers.
Other Social Media Companies Also Named in Lawsuit
TikTok, Google and Snapchat did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Claims against Meta, and its rivals include quietly encouraging children below the age of 13 to use their platforms. They also include failing to address child sexual abuse content. The lawsuit also says the companies tried to expand the use of social media products by teenagers while they were at school. The people bringing the lawsuit also say that the platforms tried to pay child-focused organizations to defend the safety of their products in public.
In one case, TikTok sponsored the National PTA and then bragged internally about how it could control the child-focused group. According to the filing, TikTok officials said the PTA will do whatever we want going forward in the fall. They said their CEO will do press statements for us. For the most part, though, the allegations against the remaining social media platforms are much less specific than those against Meta.
Documents Reveal How Meta Ignored Safety Concerns
Internal records cited by the plaintiffs in the suit claim Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used. The company blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth. Meta required users to be caught 17 times trying to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform. A document described this as a very, very, very high strike threshold.
Meta acknowledged that making its products increase teen use served them more harmful content, but went ahead and did it anyway. Because of growth concerns, Meta nixed internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years. The company leaned on safety staff to spread arguments justifying its decision not to act.
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At Inspirepreneurs Magazine, covering entrepreneurship, business failures, and the human stories behind the world's most ambitious founders. She writes at the intersection of strategy and storytelling.
