Meta is being sued, again, for harming minors through its addictive products. Lawsuits like this one pose serious threats to social media companies. (There are a lot of children out there using social media.) They also raise important and hard-to-answer questions about causality. Youth mental health may be suffering, but it’s tricky to prove that social media use is doing it. That is why science - the institution we depend on to answer hard questions about cause and effect - is so important to these cases.
That is also why industries that produce harmful products have so much interest in helping science answer questions about these products. We all know about how tobacco managed to delay consensus and regulation of cigarettes for decades. We know about how oil and gas is still fighting desperately to stop regulation of fossil fuels.
Recently collaborators and I posted new research arguing that tech companies seem to be running the same playbook on the science of social media on a preprint server. We followed up with an analysis of high profile social media research, showing that at least half of it had disclosable ties to tech companies, many of which had not been disclosed.
There have been some big feelings about our research, often from academics funded by or collaborating with tech companies. We’ve been asked to tone it down. There have been complaints that tech products aren’t harmful the way tobacco or oil and gas products are, and thus that the comparison is unfair. They’ve pointed out that their friends at Meta are good people and good researchers. They’ve accused us of being polemical.
Yesterday saw reporting on new, internal Meta documents released through the ongoing lawsuit. Meta had been using a favored industry strategy of including their attorneys on any risky internal correspondence so that this correspondence would be protected by attorney-client privilege. The judge called bullshit.
The resulting documents reveal:
Explicit plans by Meta to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been raising alarms about social media and youth mental health.
Frustration by internal researchers because Meta lawyers were stopping them from researching youth mental health and their platforms. (Why would lawyers stop these studies? Because they risk finding something. The researchers respond by asking "“if the study only included questions about social support/positive outcomes would legal approve?”)
Explicit plans to work with the National Academies of Sciences on social media and youth mental health with goals to “get credit” for proposing the assessment and “greatly shape the nature of the questions they will explore.”
Alternative plans to work with another group if they cannot adequately influence NAS research, and “ensure product feature evaluations are excluded” (i.e., their product features that might be causing harm)
Discussions of which study questions are most likely to yield benefits for the company
Similar internal tobacco and fossil fuel documents landed those companies in a lot of hot water, and since then it is rarer to see such explicit plans to interfere with science in writing. I hope that those defending the intentions of these companies pay attention. And I hope we get to see the thousands of documents that the plaintiffs on this case still seek to reveal.