“The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study,” the lawsuit alleges. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.”
A series of documents recently revealed in a lawsuit against Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, suggest the company put an end to some of its internal mental research after finding that people who take a break from social media often report lower levels of anxiety and depression as a result.
According to CNBC, a legal brief submitted to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California states that Meta began researching “the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions” under the name Project Mercury in 2019. The brief was filed in connection with high-profile multidistrict litigation, with lawsuits filed on behalf of a wide variety of plaintiffs, and broadly alleges that companies like Meta knew their platforms were harmful to children and young adults but failed to take meaningful corrective action. Instead, the lawsuits say, social media companies began spreading misinformation in an apparent attempt to mislead educators and regulators alike.
Meta has repeatedly protested these allegations, saying that it has always prioritized the health and well-being of its most vulnerable users.
“We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. “The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences.”
Google, which is facing same allegations, said that the “lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works.”
“YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends,” Google said. “We’ve also developed dedicated tools for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control.”
However, the recently-filed briefing notes that Project Mercury found that people who stopped using Facebook “for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.” Meta didn’t just fail to “sound the alarm,” attorneys say, but chose to put an immediate end to the research.
“The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study,” the lawsuit alleges. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.”
The filing also quotes an unnamed Meta employee, who allegedly asked, “If the results [of the study] are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”
Stone, the Meta spokesman, suggested that the lawsuit is drawing the wrong conclusion.
In a set of social media posts, Stone said that the 2019 study was discontinued because it was flawed, with its results only finding that “people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it.”
“This is a confirmation of other public research (“deactivation studies”) out there that demonstrates the same effect,” Stone wrote. “It makes intuitive sense but it doesn’t show anything about the actual effect of using the platform.”
Stone also claimed that Project Mercury was mere a “pilot” study intended to head more complex and multi-tiered research.
“The study was intentionally designed to overcome expectation effects in order to understand the real impact of deactivation. It included a staged approach, starting with a pilot to see if these efforts would work,” Stone said on Twitter. “Unfortunately, they did not. And that is the reason this study did not continue.”
Sources
Lawsuit alleges social media giants buried their own research on teen mental health harms
Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges
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