Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/09/08/meta-research-child-safety-virtual-reality/

by mdhb • 11 months ago

509 347 11 months ago

ITB2• 11 months ago

You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.

realz4• 11 months ago

Have you considered that maybe the outrage is about what the research results contain?

ITB2• 11 months ago

I’m not saying social media is good for children.

I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 11 months ago

You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks

Who doesn't like these?

add-sub-mul-div• 11 months ago

You're so close to getting it. Maybe there's one more option...

nova22033• 11 months ago

We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."

tuckerman• 11 months ago

I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.

It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674

barbazoo3• 11 months ago

Who is "you" here?

andsoitis2• 11 months ago

At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.

It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:

a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)

b) validates age

c) product not available to kids

d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor

gjsman-10005• 11 months ago

validates age

This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.

I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.

I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.

For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.

mxkopy2• 11 months ago

I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.

My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish

abeppu4• 11 months ago

How about:

e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.

If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.

andsoitis2• 11 months ago

this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?

freejazz14• 11 months ago

e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos

like_any_other2• 11 months ago

Isn't e) how a bunch of sting operations already work? And doesn't really require much cooperation from Facebook - there's nothing stopping people from recording, and given enough evidence (e.g. that the stranger knew (or thought they knew) the user was underage, and continued their sexual advances), this would turn into a police warrant to Facebook to deanonymize the perp. As far as I know Facebook already complies with such requests (and makes it extremely hard to use their products anonymously), so... what more do we want them to do? Isn't the space they're providing much safer than being out in public, for a child?

dlivingston• 11 months ago

I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.

randunel• 11 months ago

I deleted my account at some point after they removed the "sort by date" feature in the timeline, probably more than 10 years ago, because that's when it became clear they wanted to be fully in control of my data sources and that's a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for keeping in touch with distant friends such as former classmates.

IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.

outime• 11 months ago

What if the real disruptor is just not using social networks?

255kb• 11 months ago

Exactly, do we need social media in the first place? I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...

Zagreus2142• 11 months ago

Yes this, exactly this.

To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.

BeFlatXIII2• 11 months ago

The grass shall be touched.

andy99• 11 months ago

I'm curious what properties a "good" social network would have?

otterley• 11 months ago

Facebook in the mid 2000s was pretty good. It was a chronological timeline of your friends’ posts along with a photo album. It was like LiveJournal but with a much better UI.

ratelimitsteve• 11 months ago

no algorithmic content driving the variable reward schedule in order to induce compulsive behavior, just content I've explicitly selected and a willingness to say "we've run out of content" instead of just filling the infinite feed with whatever

jjani6• 11 months ago

Anything without a feed backed by a recommender system.

Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.

jimt1234• 11 months ago

IMHO, having effective parental controls would be good enough.

SketchySeaBeast2• 11 months ago

Honestly, I think it has already. People have dropped off them. Even my parents now primarily communicate over WhatsApp/Signal.

HankStallone3• 11 months ago

I dunno, I've been hearing for years that no one uses Facebook anymore, or it's just Boomers, but that's not how it is in my area. Most of the small businesses use it as their main presence online, because it's so easy to toss up a post about a new product or sale or a picture of their new menu. All the small towns have active FB groups where people share community activities and help each other find lost pets and such. My own family uses FB messenger to plan events and keep each other informed about things, which is the only reason I still use it.

Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.

micromacrofoot2• 11 months ago

disruption in the space will make it worse, not better, see: tiktok

2OEH8eoCRo02• 11 months ago

The unending quest for growth leads to bad incentives. We could absolutely build products that turn a reasonable profit and respect users. They already did this in their early days. Chasing growth forever doesn't allow this.

It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.

LeifCarrotson2• 11 months ago

Just stop using it? Delete your accounts, uninstall the apps, and stop being miserable.

I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.

Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.

Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!

There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.

doublerabbit2• 11 months ago

I'm someone who deleted my account back in 2010. I've lived life without Facebook, Instagram and it's been hell. I've been targeted with emotional sabotage for not having Facebook.

"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.

My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.

Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.

My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.

CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.

Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.

FOMO becomes real.

Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email

My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.

I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.

It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.

JohnMakin• 11 months ago

guess what, you're still a facebook user whether you use their platforms or not. This post shows a lack of understanding of how this company actually makes money.

fullshark• 11 months ago

I don't miss the old facebook, but I'm also not 20 anymore. I just don't want to share random thoughts or my life's highlights with everyone I've ever met anymore. The only people who do are people doing advertising.

I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.

barbazoo3• 11 months ago

What’s keeping you on there?

fsflover5• 11 months ago

You already can do it now: https://joinmastodon.org.

WhyNotHugo• 11 months ago

What kind of disruption are you expecting? It can only get replaced with something similar, not something better.

Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.

Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.

dagmx2• 11 months ago

https://archive.is/AVCuH

Lio2• 11 months ago

I saw Rob Pike online asking about what to tell people that don’t understand why anyone would boycott Meta services.

For me it’s stuff like this.

jermberj3• 11 months ago

Link?

Lio2• 11 months ago

I'm not going to post a link for you but you can go to Bluesky and search for Rob Pike. The thread is a recent one.

blitzar2• 11 months ago

How dumb do you have to be to commision this reasearch at Meta? Did they honestly think the result was going to be good for them?

Frost1x• 11 months ago

This just in, private corporation with profit motive doesn’t voluntarily provide negative information that hurts their profit motive. News at 11.

Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.

blitzar2• 11 months ago

The original sin was writing a signed confession of their crimes and packaging it up with a video of them commiting said crimes.

You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.

moolcool3• 11 months ago

There's cynical reasons to commission this research, since "user misery" is clearly one of the levers they pull to increase engagement.

It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.

dagmx2• 11 months ago

Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.

This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.

A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.

ModernMech3• 11 months ago

How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"

I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.

cess11• 11 months ago

Don't get mad, organise.

utyop224• 11 months ago

Yeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.

binary1322• 11 months ago

Why are you displacing blame from meta?

SoftTalker2• 11 months ago

It is the modern version of "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."

anal_reactor2• 11 months ago

This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.

dzink2• 11 months ago

There is a mistaken assumption here that government will ever do anything better for tech products.

polytely2• 11 months ago

Atleast in China they have to option to give CEO's the death penalty if they step out of line. I think silicon valley behaviour would be better if the CEO's had some skin in the game.

everdrive2• 11 months ago

Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance

Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.

novok• 11 months ago

Government divisions ignore ethics & morality all the time if it's politically inconvenient, and what is even worse is since they are the government, they are immune from most criminal and civil prosecution! Using the PRC as a bastion of morality isn't good idea either. (watch as I get pro-PRC troll replies)

Be careful what you wish for!

this_user• 11 months ago

This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides

Have you seen recent US governments?

sleepybrett• 11 months ago

I prefer the classic american approach. Smash them to pieces.

Taek• 11 months ago

From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?

If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.

watwut4• 11 months ago

From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.

That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.

moolcool3• 11 months ago

From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!

bix65• 11 months ago

I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.

yndoendo• 11 months ago

This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.

Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.

Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.

pfortuny2• 11 months ago

Being the owner of a business does not exempt you from being a human being. Ethics apply. A person is more valuable than a company.

lossolo• 11 months ago

Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.

jjulius• 11 months ago

From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.

the8472• 11 months ago

What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior?

Assuming you meant incentives, how about collecting fines in voting shares?

tehjoker3• 11 months ago

Why don't we simply make sure that workers and the government have major stakes in companies so that incentives are more aligned with social needs?

libraryatnight• 11 months ago

This mode of thought is absolute cancer.

delusional• 11 months ago

Interestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform.

This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.

moolcool3• 11 months ago

Consider how much oil and tobacco companies knew about the harms of their products.

It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.

slg6• 11 months ago

Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.

swed4206• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.

Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.

As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.

Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?

When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.

Apocryphon2• 11 months ago

Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.

palmotea• 11 months ago

just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.

Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:

The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
...
The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
...
In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
...
Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
...
The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.

Retric4• 11 months ago

No, many companies actually try and avoid harming their customers. Thus new safety features on cars etc.

Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.

procaryote2• 11 months ago

This does deflect blame away from Meta though, even if you say you don't want to do that.

beambot• 11 months ago

Sorry, he said the wrong numbers...

mgh22• 11 months ago

Meta did not directly dispute or confirm the events in Germany described by the researchers, but said such a deletion would have been meant to ensure compliance with a U.S. federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data and with the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European privacy law that broadly prohibits companies from collecting personal information from anyone without consent.

"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.

Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.

thegrimmest• 11 months ago

You're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use.

Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.

procaryote2• 11 months ago

A fair number of people probably agree that it's bad to pretend to research the harm of your product to kids while suppressing data that shows such harm,

We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.

christophilus• 11 months ago

I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."

That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.

abeppu4• 11 months ago

In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?

- who provides your utilities?

- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?

- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?

- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?

For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.

deberon• 11 months ago

Aren’t those all industries that are now highly regulated because they proved themselves to be untrustworthy?

walthamstow3• 11 months ago

They didn't see "don't use", they said "don't trust", meaning apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say.

It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?

cm2012• 11 months ago

In my experience, big businesses are way better about worker compensation, benefits and treatments compared to small businesses in the same industy.

skizm• 11 months ago

You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.

micromacrofoot2• 11 months ago

"Meta suppressed research on child safety" again ... why is anyone still using this company for anything ever?

RianAtheer• 11 months ago

Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces. They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern

utyop224• 11 months ago

Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.

philjohn• 11 months ago

I worked on Integrity at Meta for 4 years, including a stint on the child safety team.

Absolutely, I would have been fine with the stock not growing as fast (it would still have grown, Meta has billions of users), as would every single one of the IC's I regularly worked with.

sniffers• 11 months ago

The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?

Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!

kevmo• 11 months ago

We are feeding children to the wolves to boost quarterly Big Tech numbers.

Society is breaking down in part because of it.

America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.

gjsman-10005• 11 months ago

If it wasn't Big Tech, the people here would have us feeding them to Mastodon. I do not believe that's much of an improvement.

Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...

Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.

fsflover5• 11 months ago

Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors; it doesn't track you, doesn't show you ads or tries to earn money from you. It's like email.

barbazoo3• 11 months ago

True, plus Meta's harmful impact goes way beyond the US of A so it would benefit probably everybody.

jjani6• 11 months ago

Going to prison would not be enough, he'd be pardoned very quickly and there'd be very little of a discouraging effect on other megacorps with similar ethics.

mixedbit3• 11 months ago

I hate that Meta and Google - companies that are among the leaders in AI and invest billions in cutting-edge machine learning R&D - pretend they are unable to detect that children are accessing their platforms in violation of age restrictions (13 years in most cases).

djrj477dhsnv13• 11 months ago

The responsibility to protect children should be put on their parents.

If they want to give their children devices to use unsupervised, then they should block access to whatever they deem harmful.

mixedbit3• 11 months ago

If social media is harmful to children, each child deserves to be protected, no matter what is their parents' opinion. This is obvious for other harmful things, we don't argue that it is up to parents to decide if their child should be allowed to use alcohol or cigarettes.

watwut4• 11 months ago

Because it is totally reasonable to expect parents to have total surveillance of all their kids every single moment of kids life up to 18 years old.

The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.

We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.

noitpmeder3• 11 months ago

Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices? Should it be soley on the parents to prevent your kid from accessing drugs? What about cigarettes/weed/alcohol? Or anything that society has put in place age-based or other legal gates.

Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?

What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".

Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.

There's a spectrum here.

11101010001100• 11 months ago

All the responsibility should be put on the parents? I suggest you run through scenarios of what that might look like....

xrd2• 11 months ago

I laughed out loud at this. It is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.

Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.

You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.

There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.

dataflow• 11 months ago

How do you expect your child to react when they end up the only ones in their classes left our of whatever others are doing?

GuinansEyebrows4• 11 months ago

if that were the most effective solution to the problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation. just because something appears to be simple doesn't mean it will be effective.

avgDev• 11 months ago

Social Media is the new tobacco.

foobar_______• 11 months ago

I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.

ergocoder2• 11 months ago

Because it's very far from being Tobacco.

Tobacco has zero utilities, meanwhile Facebook is heavily used for connecting families and sharing small life events.

Saying it is the same as Tobacco isn't useful. It's an exaggeration, which makes it hard to take the argument seriously.

teamonkey• 11 months ago

The new leaded gas.

fsflover5• 11 months ago

Verdex• 11 months ago

I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."

These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.

noitpmeder3• 11 months ago

I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.

dijit• 11 months ago

Don’t they have communicators?

Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.

I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 11 months ago

How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.

everdrive2• 11 months ago

Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.

SoftTalker2• 11 months ago

They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.

jedberg• 11 months ago

Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.

Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.

But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.

shepherdjerred• 11 months ago

I'm so excited for forums and email to return

Apocryphon2• 11 months ago

Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?

olyjohn3• 11 months ago

No the Eugenics wars were endeded well before the nuclear holocaust of WWIII. When you see Zephram Cochran in First Contact, it was many years after Earth was devastated by nuclear winter. That's why populations were sparse, and there were various warring sects all over the world fighting for power. The warp drive (and discovery of aliens) is what united humanity after all the wars.

ben_w4• 11 months ago

A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.

Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).

Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)

Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.

rightbyte• 11 months ago

Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us

The horizon is in mortar range. Like 10 km at 10m elevation of the observer.

The horizon is not very far usually.

specproc• 11 months ago

A side note, but there've been a couple of times in the most recent season of (the largely excellent) Strange New Worlds where I've thought "they're talking to the computer like an LLM now". The holodeck episode springs to mind, but I'm sure it's happened a few times.

DalasNoin• 11 months ago

I mean grok has an AI girlfriend that will undress for you. It's specifically instructed to be extremely jealous and to pretend to be madly in love with the user. Apparently no meaningful age restrictions of any kind. All this data of perhaps kids chatting explicitly with their AI partners land on company servers.

aubanel• 11 months ago

https://archive.ph/AVCuH

iphone_elegance• 11 months ago

zucks for the children

footlose_3815• 11 months ago

The frog has boiled. These companies actively profit when kids are engaged and unhappy.

Quitschquat• 11 months ago

Not surprising if you’ve read the account in “Careless People”. Growth at all costs.

My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need

mrguyorama• 11 months ago

A reminder that happy people buy less stuff.

Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.

Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.

Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means

JCM9• 11 months ago

Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.

If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.

AfterHIA• 11 months ago

In other words there will be no/positive economic and social downsides for those engaged in, "world levels" of unethical conduct.

This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.

-Silicon Valley before the 80's

MengerSponge• 11 months ago

Meta delenda est.

ath3nd2• 11 months ago

This is the company that:

- Enabled genocide in Myanmar https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

- Literally pirated books to train their trash AI LLM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

- Violated human rights for Palestinians (even in 2021: https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-pale...)

- Interfered in British politics with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, one of the costliest and stupidest mistakes in UK's history (full of stupid and costly mistakes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

- The CEO of the company is famous for ass-kissing even dumber people than himself e.g: Trump https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

What else do you expect from the trashiest company in the world. Of course they don't care for child safety.

miohtama• 11 months ago

https://archive.ph/wpyec

pkphilip2• 11 months ago

I am not surprised at all. I know no tech titan as creepy as Zuck

Rafuino• 11 months ago

Please, please, please don't entertain job offers from this company. Don't even talk with them. They don't deserve your talent

Jimmc414• 11 months ago

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

[0] https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

jay-barronville• 11 months ago

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.

animitronix• 11 months ago

Take ALL of Mark's toys away

lordhumphrey3• 11 months ago

I strongly encourage anyone who finds Meta's repeated crappy behaviour objectionable to delete their accounts on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Or, at least, to delete as many as they can get away with, given their personal constraints and obligations, and otherwise minimise as much as possible the interactions with this company.

Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.

It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.

cedws3• 11 months ago

Meta has a monopoly on socialisation, if you delete these apps it does have a detrimental effect on your social network. I refused to use any Meta apps for the longest time but eventually caved on using Instagram and it has given me the ability to connect with people more, even though I hate it.

Ianjit4• 11 months ago

"Meta has a monopoly on socialisation". Step out into the world, there is so much to discover.

Self-Perfection• 10 months ago

And I encourage anyone who cannot delete their WhatsApp due to personal constraints to set WhatsApp profile picture to QR code with the link to their preferred messenger and set name in profile to "W̶h̶a̶t̶s̶A̶p̶p̶ Telegram".

dtagames• 11 months ago

https://archive.ph/S8254

hermitcrab• 11 months ago

That Meta is an appalling company can't be a surprise to anyone by now.

alchemical_piss• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg is one of the most evil men in America.

madrasman• 11 months ago

I’m so tired of social media rotting brains and ruining health and relationships. But also find it hard to completely quit Instagram/Linkedin/X as I get some value out of it. Sewer in the water line situation.

Built a screentime app to automatically block after chosen number of mins and it’s helping me. Completely free to try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomo-reduce-screen-time/id6748...

rsynnott2• 11 months ago

Within months, [Facebook] started an initiative code-named “Project Salsa.” Sattizahn and the youth researcher said that they didn’t know who chose that name or why, but employees working on the project widely understood it as a reference to the fact that the use of technology by children was a “spicy” topic.

How is it that nobody in this industry knows how codenames work? You're supposed to pick them randomly off a list, not choose veiled references to the actual subject.

The project was code-named “Project Horton,” for the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!” in which a character tries to protect small people from others who attempt to harm them, according to the youth researcher.

No, Facebook, stop it.

(Occasionally of course this gets _coincidentally_ violated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n... - the proposed weapon was called Blue Peacock _before_ the chickens were proposed)

Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say

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