Meta & Children's Online Safety

Documents / Chat: Feed Relevance consistently distributes SSI vpvs to teenagers

Chat: Feed Relevance consistently distributes SSI vpvs to teenagers

Internal document14 messagesParticipants redacted or unnamed

Narratives:KnowledgeConcealment

Open source PDF (2 pages)

A readable view of the chat, built from the transcribed text. Each row is one timestamped message in the record. Times are Pacific, as recorded. Check the Source PDF for the original layout.

████ name redacted. Different bars may be the same person or different people.

quoted in an excerpt in the archive.

Thursday 29 September 2022

13:06████Can I please see the Mercury project results?
13:06████omg is this now an escalation?
13:07████fun!
14:43████meaning escalate to me?
14:43████or someone else? led me to who is... not being responsive.
14:44████anyhow: I actually DON'T have access to those results myself, as they were kept pretty confidential (to be fair, i *might have seen an early draft, but not the final one)
14:45████all that is to say, happy to track this down for you, but you have to tell me the business reason for needing them because i'll need that to make the case
14:58████lol no way, this is like the most secretive thing i've ever heard of
15:03████my business reasons is that i'm a research manager in the wellbeing space so like, I generally find it helpful to know what wellbeing research results say for... not doing duplicative work, and generally doing my job of understanding the impact of our platforms so i can make it better
15:03████very low priority, just like, vibes
15:04████and honestly I can guarantee I have worse shit than whatever it says lol Feed Relevance consistently distributes SSI vpvs to teenagers and nobody has noticed, like how much am I gonna care that deprivation studies show wellbeing gains from not using our shitty products
15:07████I once saw Policy outright state that they wouldn't take down the account of a Cameroonian expatriate with a massive in-country following who was explicitly calling for the murder of Ambazonians who participated in the Cameroonian elections which then absolutely happened, we saw the videos because of the PR implications. I think folks are overestimating how bad the research evidence is vs the actual practice of working at this company.
17:08████I hear you. Let me dig in and see if I can figure out a) why this is so sensitve (my sense it's less about the findings and more about leadership's reactions); and b) if I can get around this, where it is
19:10████Question: have you asked for access? IIRC, he has it.