Allegations, not findings. Open the quoted internal records to read the source.
[Opposition]: In 2023… Meta's researchers launched a longitudinal study to follow 4,000 U.S. teenagers over the academic year. The goal of this survey was to measure teens' attentiveness ("Possible unintended, unaware, and/or habitual use") and capability ("Pe…
"Teens' average scores across scales assessing sense of control (attentiveness and capability) indicate they report lower control, on average, over various aspects of their use of IG and TikTok compared to other apps."
"Teen average scores on subscales assess…
Allegations, not findings. Open the quoted internal records to read the source.
Specifically, with accounts clearly belonging to children, Meta has:
• Proactively served and directed them to a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts – even where the child has expressed no interest in this content;…
"A key goal in H1 2024 is to improve Safety for Teens. The top opportunity to do this is to improve enforcements on non-recommendable queries such as 'porn', 'meth', 'self harm', and 'skinny body', a gap that many competitors have already addressed."
"Current…
Allegations, not findings. Open the quoted internal records to read the source.
[Complaint]: Instagram heavily emphasized content that promoted negative appearance comparison. Fashion and beauty, relationships, "[w]estern pop stars who emphasize their bodies," and images that "emphasize women's bodies generally (e.g., cleavage, swimwear)"…
"We know that SSI and ED have a significantly disproportionate large teen audience. SSI and ED SWOP among teens is ████ higher than among adults on IG (query). When examining consumption patterns among high consumers (>= 8 pieces of violating content) of…
"Scientific evidence suggests that harmful content exposure as well as excessive and problematic social media use primary areas for concern."
"Teens who spend more than 3 hours/day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes"
"Problematic Use Definition
1. A perceived lack of control over usage of a technology or social media platform and
2. This lack of control is perceived to lead to negative life impacts (e.g., in domains such as relationships, work/school, sleep, etc)"
"Person…
"The Internal Audit (IA) team has completed the IG Youth Well-being Assurance Audit - Phase 1. This report is rated as 'Significant Improvements Needed' with 3 High, and 14 Medium risk observations."
"Key observation themes are summarized below:
- Inconsiste…
George Volichenko: "This is a celebration post to call out that the Mental Well-Being team has accomplished the primary P0 goal for the half: 'Reduce experiences of problematic use and negative appearance comparison. Goal metric: % of weekly active teens meani…
████: "CWB [Central Well-Being] is advocating that if we want to pursue NAC [Negative Appearance Comparison] measurement, it should go to the VP level"
Justin Cheng: "1. Strategy aside, do they have feedback on the NAC survey questions? 2. Why do they t…
"Past research on problematic use on Facebook, as well as prior academic research suggests the existence of a U-shaped curve, where people with a moderate number of sessions report the lowest rate of problematic use. As session count increases, more and more p…
"Well-being work is similar to privacy or major social issues like Health and COVID19; it needs to be addressed consistently across our platforms and in an end-to-end manner (encompassing both policy/enforcement and product changes). We're not doing this, whic…
Alison Lee: "to be honest, i was dismayed that it felt like Adam's response was that we were 'doing enough', going as far as to question 'how much is enough to invest into integrity?'"
Alison Lee: "we've repeatedly had to put p1 improvements like precision tu…
"A lot of NSC has been attributed to celebrities and influencers, and we've currently been looking at controls and ranking to solve this."
"However, it's not an influencer problem, it's a culture problem. Those influencers might be responding to Instagram's c…
Stephanie ████: "Jeff Horwitz has a leaked social comparison research deck from 2020, he's writing a story that essentially argues that IG's design is inherently bad for teenage girls (leads to SSI, poor mental health, dysmorphia) and is not something we…
Shilpa Mody: "[I]t turns out that at the high end, we really do recommend a LOT of high-NAC content to teens! Like for the top 10% of teens, our recs in Explore are 57% high-NAC :/"
████: "Would we consider not surfacing certain content in our rec surfaces that we know to be triggering?"
████: "The way that we've identified borderline harmful in other categories"
Vaishnavi Jayakumar: "Totally - we're working on a borderline …
Elizabeth Crenshaw: "some flags for this crew:
• *MIT Tech Review piece on beauty filters* -- it's not a great piece and does a lot of speculating about the long-term impacts of filters on identity + distortion of reality, esp for young girls. it's focused on …
"Some topics are likely to make viewers, especially teen girls, feel worse about their bodies: Fashion and beauty (especially makeup, skincare, hair removal, nail art); Relationships (which includes dating, romance, sex, and intimacy); Western pop stars who em…
"Teen girls perceive Instagram as the 'worst' social media app in terms of body and appearance comparison."
"Appearance-based comparison is common on Instagram. One-third (33%) of people say they compare their appearances to others' often or always. Nearly ha…
"Should we allow augmented reality (AR) effects that promote beauty standards only attainable through plastic surgery? We're seeing a rise in popularity of beauty effects – both in creation and use – which has reinvigorated the conversation on the stance that …
"Examples of bad experiences often in policy gaps… Thinspiration… Easy to find content adjacent to eating disorder part of SSI and to broader social comparison and body image issue-triggers."
"We seek to accelerate our ability to address content issues on platform for topics such as eating disorders, for which we have limited mitigations"
"Hashtags that promote eating disorders are relatively easy to find, resulting in ED content."
"Facebook is p…
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Sources: published internal records, unsealed discovery exhibits and court filings in MDL 3047 and related litigation. An allegation in a filing is not an independently verified fact.
Meta & Children's Online Safety