Meta Allegedly Hides 'Kausal' Evidence About Bad Impacts Of Social Media

JAKARTA - Meta is back in the spotlight after an unshared court document revealed that the company allegedly closed internal research showing causal evidence that Facebook and Instagram had a negative impact on users' mental health.

These findings appear in a class action lawsuit filed by school districts in the US against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat.

According to documents obtained through the disclosure process, Meta in 2020 ran a research project called Project Mercury, in collaboration with survey firm Nielsen. The research measures the impact of discontinuing Facebook and Instagram usage for one week.

The results were disappointing for Meta: users who disabled both apps reported a decrease in feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and reduced social comparison behavior.

Instead of publishing these findings or continuing further research, Meta actually stopped all of these projects. Internally, the negative findings are called contaminated' by the media narrative that at that time criticized Meta a lot.

However, according to court documents, Meta researchers personally convinced Nick Clegg at the time the head of Meta's Global Public Policy that the research results were valid.

A Meta researcher even wrote that the study had a causal impact on social comparisons, accompanied by sad facial emojis. Other researchers have likened the act of hiding these results to a cigarette industry that knows its products are dangerous but stores that information from the public.

Despite having internal evidence, the lawsuit said Meta had previously told the US Congress it "does not have the ability" to measure whether its products are harmful to teenage girls.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was halted because its methodology was considered flawed. He stressed Meta had worked hard to improve teenage security.

"For more than a decade we have listened to parents, researched important issues, and made real changes to protect teenagers," Stone said.

Motley Rice, the law firm that sued Meta and other platforms, accused the companies of hiding product risks from users, parents, and educational institutions. The lawsuit targeted Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Some of the allegations against Meta are very detailed, including:

Teenage safety features are intentionally made ineffective, and Meta is holding back feature testing that could hinder user growth.

Meta is said to require users caught 17 times trying to do sex trafficking before accounts are removed thresholds that are considered very high

Meta knows that optimizing content to make teens more comfortable actually increases their exposure to harmful content but still does so.

Efforts to prevent child predators are said to have been delayed for years in order to maintain user growth.

2021's internal message shows Mark Zuckerberg said child safety is not his main focus, as he focuses more on building the metaverse.

Meta vehemently denied the allegations and called them taking citations selectively' and misinterpreting internal documents. The company also claims to now delete accounts related to sex trafficking as soon as they are detected.

TikTok, Google and Snapchat also face charges, including:

Push children under 13 years of age to use their platforms,

failing to handle child sexual abuse content,

and even try to pay for organizations that focus on children to defend the safety of their products.

In one case, TikTok reportedly sponsored the National PTA (parent-guru association), then internally claimed to be able to influence the organization to make public statements that benefit TikTok.

Documents referred in the lawsuit are not yet available to the public. Meta has applied to cancel the document's inclusion, arguing that the scope of demand is too wide.

The Northern California District Court will hold a hearing on January 26.