Meta suppressed children’s safety research, four whistleblowers claim

Summary

Two current and two former Meta employees disclosed documents to Congress alleging that the company may have suppressed research on children’s safety, according to a report from The Washington Post. According to their claims, Meta changed its policies around researching sensitive topics — like politics, children, gender, race, and harassment — six weeks after whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents that showed how Meta’s own research found that Instagram can damage teen girls’ mental health. These revelations, which were made public in 2021, kicked off years of hearings in Congress over child safety on the internet, an issue that remains a hot topic in global governments today. As part of these policy changes, the report says, Meta proposed two ways that researchers could limit the risk of conducting sensitive research. One suggestion was to loop lawyers into their research, protecting their communications from “adverse parties” due to attorney-client privilege. Researchers could also write about their findings more vaguely, avoiding terms like “not compliant” or “illegal.” Jason Sattizahn, a former Meta researcher specializing in virtual reality, told The Washington Post that his boss made him delete recordings of an interview in which a teen claimed that his ten-year-old brother had been sexually propositioned on Meta’s VR platform, Horizon Worlds. “Global privacy regulations make clear that if information from minors under 13 years of age is collected without verifiable parental or guardian consent, it has to be deleted,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. But the whistleblowers claim that the documents they submitted to Congress show a pattern of employees being discouraged from discussing and researching their concerns around how children under 13 were using Meta’s social virtual reality apps. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative; in reality, since the start of 2022, Meta has approved nearly...