Meta employees schemed about how to “get the academic community to disavow” social media critic Jonathan Haidt — a ploy to tamp down claims that its apps were fueling a teen mental health crisis, according to newly unsealed court documents.
Haidt, a social psychologist who penned the best-selling book “The Anxious Generation,” is one of the most influential figures speaking out against Big Tech and the effects that smartphones and social media have had on kids. When Meta lost a historic social media addiction case in Los Angeles earlier this year, Haidt wrote that “history will judge them as harshly as the tobacco industry.”
Documents unsealed in California federal court last Friday revealed the lengths to which Meta was willing to go to undermine his advocacy. One filing contained notes from a March 2023 Meta meeting about “well-being.” The unnamed author of the notes wrote that an executive named Curtiss – likely a reference to Meta’s research chief Curtiss Cobb – had set a “goal” to discredit Haidt.
The employee wrote that Curtiss “thinks we need to focus on the media” to convince reporters that Haidt is “not credible.” Meta’s staffers also apparently discussed contacting a media figure referred to as “Gellman” to “write a take-down piece” about Haidt. It was not immediately clear who Gellman was.
Other meeting notes discussed the viability of a “whisper strategy” to “turn academics against Haidt” and consider ways in which “debunking Haidt can happen.”
Haidt told The Post he was “not surprised” by Meta’s actions.
“It’s a company seemingly determined to keep the truth from coming out, even within its own walls,” he said in a Tuesday statement. “But the most damning revelation is the lengths that Meta was willing to go to manipulate the scientific process and the scientific community.
“They discussed using a ‘whisper strategy’ to turn my colleagues against me. They strategized about how to ‘enrage’ other researchers,” Haidt added. “If social manipulation was the heart of their strategy for responding to my writing, that is strong evidence that they had no way to rebut my research.”
Meta did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.
It’s unclear if Meta ever actually followed through on the plan. Still, Fairplay, an online watchdog and one of the most vocal critics of Meta’s targeting of kids to boost profits, expressed outrage over the revelations.
“These internal documents from Meta demonstrate once again that the company is far more concerned with managing its reputation than actually making Instagram safer and less addictive for young people,” Fairplay executive director Josh Golin said in a statement.
“Rather than engage with the substance of Jonathan Haidt’s evidence-based criticisms, Meta launched a covert plan to discredit an academic whose best-selling book helped galvanize a parent movement,” Golin added.
The tranche of documents also included an email exchange from March 2023 in which a Meta employee grumbled that the company’s legal team was “trying to block or redesign” a planned study on “youth social emotional trends.”
Elsewhere, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former head of global affairs, wrote in a December 2022 email to other executives that a potential presentation on youth well-being to the National Academies of Sciences could invite questions “on topics of design that we had hoped to avoid” regarding its apps.
The documents surfaced in complex federal multidistrict litigation in California federal court – a bid to streamline thousands of cases that make similar claims about social media addiction and online harm into a few “bellwether” cases to determine the legal merits of their arguments.
A coalition of school districts have accused Meta of fueling a teen mental health crisis. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the case.
The documents were unsealed only after a major court tussle in which the plaintiffs accused Meta of abusing attorney-client privilege to withhold or redact thousands of company records.
Gonzalez Rogers ultimately ordered the appointment of an independent “special master” — retired US Judge Suzanne Segal – to review the company’s classifications for some 170,000 documents and determine which were properly withheld and which weren’t.
As The Post reported, Gonzalez Rogers also slammed Meta over revelations that the company had made swag hats for its employees with the phrase “attorney-client privilege” to celebrate the 2024 launch of Instagram’s Teen Accounts.
“I have never seen a company whose employees are so taken with the attorney-client privilege that they’d have caps made,” the judge said during an Oct. 9 hearing.
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