Meta & Children's Online Safety

Documents / Chat: like addicts, [teens] feel that they are unable to stop themselves from being on IG

Chat: like addicts, [teens] feel that they are unable to stop themselves from being on IG

Internal document15 messages1 named participant, plus redacted or unnamed

Narratives:KnowledgeConcealment

Open source PDF (4 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.

Tuesday 3 March 2020

09:58████BJ can you think of any recent studies where we explicitly talk about time spent tools and why teens want them
09:59Wendy Tegge Grossthe teen mental health research is the most recent. We also talked about it in the teen well-being research in December 2018
10:00████k ill check those out
10:27Wendy Tegge GrossThe feedback, essentially, is that (1) teens feel addicted to IG and feel a pressure to be present, (2) like addicts, they feel that they are unable to stop themselves from being on IG, and (3) the tools we currently have aren't effective at limiting their time on the ap
10:29████but if the solution was to just remove the tools and be done with it
10:29████do you think that's better or worse?
10:33Wendy Tegge Grossit's probably neutral, tbh. The one metaphor that stuck with me is comparing the Your Activity tool to a scale. You look at it but feels punishing, and you control yourself only because you never want to see that big of a number again
10:34████hmm interesting
10:34████does this sound OK to you? "Time Spent tools are crucial proof points when speaking to consumers, the press, and stakeholders about our efforts to combat social media addiction. We've also recently heard from teens that the amount of time they spend on IG is one of the worst aspects of their relationship with the app. Outreach feels strongly that we should not remove these tools, and instead invest to fix any discrepancies.
11:34Wendy Tegge GrossDo we want to call it addiction?
11:35████Maybe not
11:35████Actually yah I think that's the term that press and stakeholders use
11:35████(This is internal only)
11:36Wendy Tegge GrossInternal only makes it better. I'm just a little cautious about calling it an addiction
11:37████Totally agree, we would never want to say that!