After Frances Haugen revealed how Facebook — now Meta — knew that using Instagram endangered the mental health of teenagers, it allegedly continued to “prioritise profit over safety”.
New court filings by the US government and testimony to the US Congress have raised this issue.
New York attorney-general Letitia James, who is part of a lawsuit by 33 attorneys-general filed in California in October, said: “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.
“Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.”
On the same day, eight other attorneys-general filed similar lawsuits in their state courts.
Facebook broke laws designed to protect minors, the lawsuits allege.
“Meta’s design choices and practices take advantage of and contribute to young users’ susceptibility to addiction,” according to a multistate lawsuit. “They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image or video and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.”
More damning details emerged this month when parts of the lawsuit were unredacted, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Teens are insatiable when it comes to ‘feel good’ dopamine effects,” according to a Meta presentation. “And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected, their brains deliver them a dopamine hit.”
More damaging are new unredacted comments made by the Instagram executives. “It’s not ‘regulators’ or ‘critics’ who think Instagram is unhealthy for young teens — it’s everyone from researchers and academic experts to parents,” Instagram head of policy Karina Newton wrote in a May 2021 e-mail. “The blueprint of the app is inherently not designed for an age group that does not have the same cognitive and emotional skills that older teens do.”
The lifetime value of a 13-year-old is roughly $270
— Facebook 2018 e–mail
Contrary to what a Facebook executive claimed at a congressional hearing, namely that it wasn’t thinking about profitability for teen-focused apps, a 2018 e-mail — included in the lawsuit — highlighted the product decision-making for “the lifetime value of a 13-year-old teen is roughly $270”.
Talk about a smoking gun.
Meta denied this, saying “the complaint mischaracterises our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents”, according to spokesperson Stephanie Otway.
Otway is implicated in a damning e-mail to Instagram head Adam Mosseri after The Wall Street Journal revealed Haugen’s revelations in 2021. “Our own research confirmed what everyone has long suspected,” Otway wrote to Mosseri in August 2021.
This new batch of unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms’ usage above the wellbeing of users”, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It cites an e-mail thread from late 2017 into early 2018 in which Facebook’s chief of product Chris Cox and chief marketing officer Alex Schultz discussed reducing how many notifications users received.
“Fundamentally I believe that we have abused the notifications channel as a company,” wrote Schultz in the unredacted e-mail thread, concurring with Cox, who said the company shouldn’t back off doing what was “better for people” because usage metrics were down.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “Zuckerberg overrode them, according to the unredacted portions of the complaint, with executive Naomi Gleit, now head of product at Meta, saying that daily usage ‘is a bigger concern for Mark right now than user experience’.”
Another smoking gun.
Earlier in November, another highly placed Facebook whistleblower made damaging claims about how much the company knew about the mental health dangers.
Former engineer Arturo Bejar, who worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, testified to a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing about Instagram and Facebook’s algorithms. He returned to Instagram in 2019 to work on its wellbeing team after his teenage daughter was sexually harassed on the picture-sharing app.
“She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment,” Bejar told lawmakers. “She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing.”
After spending a year collecting data, Bejar discovered that 51% of Instagram users reported a “bad or harmful experience” during the previous week, while 21% experienced bullying and 24% received unwanted sexual advances, according to National Public Radio. Only 2% of posts reported as harmful content were ever removed.
“It is unacceptable that a 13-year-old girl gets propositioned on social media,” Bejar testified.
Appalled at his findings, Bejar e-mailed a two-page letter in 2021 to Zuckerberg, then COO Sheryl Sandberg, Cox and Mosseri.
“I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” he wrote. “There is no feature that helps people know that kind of behaviour is not OK.”
Not surprisingly, he never heard back from Zuckerberg. Other executives responded but did not address the problems, he said.
This month Bejar testified that “when I left Facebook in 2021, I thought the company would take my concerns and recommendations seriously. Yet, years have gone by and millions of teens are having their mental health compromised and are still being traumatised.”
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