Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
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The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege:
- Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth.
- Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold."
- Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway.
- Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to ac
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The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege:
Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth. Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold." Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway. Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to ac
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Reading for fun: The proportion of children who never read for fun increased from 11% to 53% Arts participation: Those who never took part in arts activities rose from 26% to 70% Music: Students who never joined extracurricular music increased from 70% to 85% Social media use: Daily users jumped more than 200%, from 26% to 85%, while non-users plummeted from 31% to just 3%.
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An account is spamming horrific, dehumanizing videos of immigration enforcement because the Facebook algorithm is rewarding them for it.
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Since its founding, Facebook has described itself as a kind of public service that fosters relationships. In 2005, not long after the site’s launch, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described the network as an “icebreaker” that would help you make friends. Facebook has since become Meta, with more grandiose ambitions, but its current mission statement is broadly similar: “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”
More than 3 billion people use Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram every day, and more still use rival platforms that likewise promise connection and community. But a new era of deeper, better human fellowship has yet to arrive. Just ask Zuckerberg himself. “There’s a stat that I always think is crazy,” he said in April, during an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more; I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
Zuckerberg was wrong about the details—the majority of American adults say they have at least three close friends, according to recent surveys—but he was getting at something real. There’s no question that we are becoming less and less social. People have sunk into their phones, enticed into endless, mindless “engagement” on social media. Over the past 15 years, face-to-face socialization has declined precipitously. The 921 friends I’ve accumulated on Facebook, I’ve always known, are not really friends at all; now the man who put this little scorecard in my life was essentially agreeing.
Zuckerberg, however, was not admitting a failure. He was pointing toward a new opportunity. In Marc Andreessen’s influential 2023 treatise, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the venture capitalist wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.
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The trial, expected in January, is among the first to advance from a wave of litigation accusing social media companies of making their apps addictive and enticing to young people despite being aware of mental health and other risks.
