Meta has halted an internal study into Facebook’s impact on mental health after receiving evidence of harm from its products, according to unredacted court documents filed by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
Meta has halted an internal study into Facebook’s impact on mental health after receiving evidence of harm from its products, according to unredacted court documents filed by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
According to new court documents cited by Reuters, in 2020 the company launched Project Mercury with research firm Nielsen. Some users were asked to «turn off» Facebook for a week. Meta internally acknowledged that people who did not use the social network reported lower levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison.
Rather than release the results or continue the work, Meta halted the study and internally stated that the negative findings were «tainted» by the media hype surrounding the social network. At the same time, one employee emphasized in an internal correspondence that the study showed the causal influence of Facebook on social comparison, and another compared the suppression of such data to the practices of tobacco corporations, who knew about the dangers of cigarettes and did not share it.
Despite its own data linking the company’s products to mental health decline, the lawsuit alleges that Meta told Congress that it could not measure the extent to which its platforms were harming teenage girls, in particular. In response, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was halted due to «methodological flaws» and that the company has been investing in teen safety and other protective tools for years.
The Project Mercury cover-up allegations are just one part of a larger lawsuit that Motley Rice is bringing on behalf of school districts against Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat. The plaintiffs allege that the companies knowingly concealed from users, parents and teachers the internally known risks of their products, encouraged minors to use the services, failed to adequately combat child sexual abuse material and sought to increase teen engagement even during school hours.
A separate block of accusations concerns work with children’s organizations: the materials mention that one of the platforms sponsored a parents' association and boasted within the company that now this structure will «do everything we need for us»: from public statements to supporting the necessary messages.
As for Meta, the plaintiffs describe a range of internal decisions: from allegedly deliberately weak safety tools for youth and an excessively high «threshold» for blocking accounts related to human trafficking, to delaying initiatives that were supposed to make it more difficult for predators to contact children. The documents also cite messages in which Mark Zuckerberg allegedly admitted in 2021 that child safety was not his top priority compared to the development of the metaverse. Meta denies these allegations, calls the quotes taken out of context and insists that its tools for protecting teens are «generally effective.»
A hearing on the disclosure of internal documents in this case is scheduled for January 26 in the Northern California District Court. If the court allows a wider range of materials to be released, the discussion about the real impact of major social networks on the mental health of adolescents and about the responsibility of the platforms for the risks they know about could move to a new level.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Meta is launching a mobile tool called Facebook Content Protection, which automatically searches for copies of authors' original Reels and allows them to decide what to do with other people’s reposts: block them, track them, or leave them with an attribution.
