2014–2026
539 passages quoted from Meta's internal records, court filings and congressional testimony, in date order. Each is labelled with its source.
Addiction & problematic use
"Our data as currently shown is incorrect. It's not just that Apple / Google have better data. Ours is wrong. Far worse. We're sharing bad metrics externally. We've been unable to right it despite several person-months of efforts."
Addiction & problematic use
████: "We're emailing to start the process of unshipping Time Spent. We think this will be uncontroversial for most product stakeholders given that the phone OSs since replicated the functionality and the metrics in the tool cannot match what is reported at an OS level presenting a metrics integrity risk. Outreach disagrees with unshipping unless we could quickly move on building an acceptable update or replacement." "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 (or replace with Ads team proposal, which may fundamentally change the tool's purpose), and instead invest in updating these tools to better fit user needs, especially since Facebook is likely announcing an update." Yoav Shapira: "I'd like to unship this without a replacement." ████: "I'm also supportive of unshipping, but one thing for us to think about is how Time Spent could impact future work in the Mental Health area (e.g. Social Comparison) and how we might bring transparency to what people are spending time on (including if they are spending too much time in the app). Of course there are other ways to do that, but if transparency around time spent in the app is a direction we'd like to explore then revisiting this feature in the future might be necessary." Karina Newton: "For policy POV background, the time spent dash + end of feed notification is the biggest proof point we have on tech addiction/problematic use and the tool with the most positive sentiment from our mental health stakeholders -- there's no product work we've done in the last four years that comes close and we wouldn't have the credibility we now have in the social comparison/mental health partner space had we not launched this. It also has outsized policy value as we held multiple design hacks on the time spent tools with the UK, US, and German governments and it was a key subject of Vishal's testimony to UK parliament. In order to land this unship successfully we would need to land the why, and without doing so we would lose significant credibility with our policy and mental health stakeholders (and the fact that people who use it spend less time on Instagram underscores the delicacy). My hunch is adoption is low not only because the device level info is now so good, but also because we did no in-app education about it and haven't evolved or improved it over time (I don't believe we've had PM support since ████ left). The metrics issue is really problematic so I understand why it's so tempting to unship, but I don't think that's going to land well without having something that addresses the underlying issue around problematic use which is a space Well-Being, to ████ point, is so actively working on. If the metrics issue is the core problem, is there not something we could do in terms of pivoting the product where we take away the dash piece that causes metric issues (and can talk about iOS/Android doing such a good job of that) but keep the reminder feature and maybe package/add an entry point to the unfollow/graph trimming pieces growth has done. I.e. is unship our only option or is there some nominal amount of work we could do to evolve it so we can maintain the value we still have in it and explain the why in a thoughtful manner?" Yoav Shapira: "I remain a fan of unshipping this, too. Previously we thought we might bundle the removal with a new feature around 'away mode' or 'take a break.' But that's been deprioritized, sadly, for another P0." ████: "PMM / Comms felt strongly that it will land poorly to remove this feature that is well appreciated by some when we evaluated the unship in March before COVID surge." ████: "The time spent unship proposal went through the IG Unship Review process (w/ ████ and came back as unship." ████: "Hi! I know this conversation is currently paused, but wanted to share another reason why it's really crucial to keep (or update) Time Spent tools. Much of the coverage around the Feed Recs launch has been around IG caring less about digital well-being, but did note that IG still has tools to address time spent. Important for us to have proof points to counter negative press around well-being (knowing that Feed Recs is a priority for IG)."
Addiction & problematic use
"We've consistently deprioritized addiction as a work area, which I think is the right call anyhow. Investing further here isn't likely. There's not going to be this option #4 any time soon, I don't think."
Addiction & problematic use
[Appendix: Detail on considerations]: "Well-being strategy: We recently decided to focus our new teen well-being bet on social comparison, giving us conviction that we will not focus on problematic use for the foreseeable future. That said, there are dimensions of social comparison that are amplified by specific types of problematic use, so 'Your Activity'-framed features may be considered."
Diego Castaneda: "though there is this 'users were more likely to control content at the content level. In fact, most never actually went into the settings menu... very few could accurately or confidently' so pretty much worse case scenario. so we need a better entry point or other contextual education. ISnt safety the whole point of this team?" ████: "The point of this team is to prevent another Atlantic article about how shitty instagram is" Diego Castaneda: "totally. so fucking shit.. lets man up and default people. tell them in rosy language and spend 2 million dollars on an ad campaign .. 'we care about your kids' 'we care about you.. that whjy toady we are launching the...'" ████: "exactly" Diego Castaneda: "they should put us in charge"
Body image & eating disordersContent Algorithm
████: "I think the radical move is that the team's vision should be to move IG out of the position of being uniquely worst for teens' social comparison and body image" ████: "It's the only social media app that's consistently placed into the 'high effect on feeling bad about myself'" ████: "And accomplishing something of that magnitude requires much more than just some changes to ranking and dialogs saying we care about a user"
Body image & eating disordersFilters
Andy O'Connell: "Mark- Next Thursday we are meeting to decide whether we should continue, modify, or lift the temporary ban on Cosmetic Surgery AR Effects that we instituted in October 2019 in response to expert and press concerns about potential negative wellbeing impacts (especially on minors)." Mark Zuckerberg: "It has always felt paternalistic to me that we've limited people's ability to present themselves in these ways, especially when there's no data I've seen that suggests doing so is helpful or not doing so is harmful, and that there's clearly demand for this type of expression. I'm generally supportive of finding a way to relax or lift these bans. That said, I'm not sure I was involved with how we got to this point, and it may be very difficult to relax restrictions from where we are now. I'm interested in seeing our best plan to do so, and then I can make a call on whether this something it makes sense to prioritize doing right now." ████: "Hi Mark - Attached is our product/comms plan to lift the ban on Cosmetic Surgery AR Effects. Let us know if you need any more information to decide whether we should continue, modify, or lift the temporary ban." Mark Zuckerberg: "I'm supportive of moving forward with option 2 (lifting restrictions but not promoting on IG). I don't think this is urgent to resolve, so I'm certainly willing to take a longer path to roll this out if it will help us land it better. I don't have strong opinions on other implementation details so I'll leave you to figure those out."
Body image & eating disorders
"Social comparison is worse on Instagram. It is perceived as real life, but based on celebrity standards. Explore and profile stalking enables never-ending rabbit holes. Celebrity content is more frequent but friends' content is more impactful in terms of social comparison." "66% of teen girls on IG experience negative social comparison (compared to 40% of teen boys)" "52% Of teen girls who experienced negative social comparison on Instagram, said it was caused by images related to beauty" "32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse" "Instagram is seen as having the highest impact [on body appearance comparison], although TikTok and Snapchat aren't far behind" "Users experience of downward spiral is exacerbated by our platform" "Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm" "Mental health outcomes related to this can be severe"
Body image & eating disordersFilters
Monika Bickert: "I wanted to flag next Thursday's meeting (4/2) with Mark on 'Cosmetic Surgery AR Effects'. The issue is whether to continue our October 2019 ban on certain facial filters that mimic plastic surgery (reshaping the chin or nose, etc.). Product wants to lift the ban, but there are potential safety and IG brand risks – Nick is pretty worried about them... • Potential safety risk: We spoke to 18 mental health experts around the world. Each one raised concern that cosmetic surgery filters could cause lasting harm, especially to young people. There's no longitudinal research on this yet, however. • Potential Brand risk: The press sharply criticized us last summer after we started allowing developers to build their own effects and some of their effects were cosmetic surgery effects. We instituted the temporary ban in October because of the bad press and agreed to revisit in a few months (now). • Product perspective: Understandably, product and growth teams want to allow these effects; they're popular – especially in APAC – and developers wants freedom to be creative. Some product folks (and Adam Mosseri) think it could work to allow the filters but remove them from recommendations. It's not a perfect answer, though, because people find filters through following influencers more than through recommendations." Sheryl Sandberg: "I just reviewed this. I really hope we can keep the ban since we already have it. This follows our standards of being ahead on eating disorders, self harm. Let's not break something that is not broken."
Child sexual exploitation
"Is anyone else receiving child abuse reports on platform? In the last 24 hours I've received a ton :( I've seen terrible things, we're not detecting it :(((("
Direct Messaging
• "DMs are where most unwanted interactions happen, but they can also happen in mentions and tags since there are no controls. Research strongly suggests that DM's are the most problematic interaction vector for teenagers on Instagram. Moreover, teens delete approximately 47% of the DM threads and requests they receive in the first 14 days on Instagram within four weeks, indicating that a large number of unwanted interactions involving new users occur through this channel. While people are not reporting, untagging, or deleting mentions and tags nearly as often (less than 1/30th as often), we know from research and anecdotal evidence that unwanted tags and mentions are a serious problem for celebrities, top media producers, and other top accounts. Furthermore, there is evidence that users are not aware of these settings." • "Teens want meaningful interactions from both people they know and people they don't, but they don't want inappropriate or spammy interactions. Defaulting teens to a restricted DM setting could reduce DMs associated with new follows by 60% or more, thereby preventing an important way that new users form positive connections with people they don't know, as well as with accounts of people they do know who have unidentifiable information from their profile. It's likely that this decision would significantly impact growth. Multiple signals from qualitative research with teens support this -- teens tell us that they are fearful of missing out if unconnected DMs are restricted." "In weighing the balance between 'safety' and 'value' for new teen accounts, the signals surfaced in this investigation suggest that we keep the current default interaction settings as-is. The value of DM's in promoting wanted social interactions form key pieces of a healthy Instagram experience and social graph growth in teens." "Insight 2. Starting new teens in a default restricted reachability setting could significantly reduce the volume of overall unwanted interactions in DMs, the primary vector by which people experience unwanted interactions."
Bullying & harassmentDirect Messaging
"7% of teens report experiencing bullying on Instagram each week." "B&H [Bullying and Harassment] prevalence in DM's is very high (10%) according to the September prototype metric"
Body image & eating disordersFilters
"Sheryl – this has now gone back to Mark, I added you to the email thread. As discussed before, I think there are multiple reasons – of principle and of practice – why reversing our ban on surgical cosmetic features would be a very unwise thing to do. We would – rightly – be accused of putting growth over responsibility. This would be a good time for you to raise with Mark before he decides. Reputationally, it would be a v regressive step indeed – we will be heavily attacked both in the press and by interest groups concerned about the wellbeing of adolescents, especially teenage girls. We are not depriving people of freedom to express themselves in some draconian way because we do allow other cosmetic features (make-up, cartoon etc). This ban only applies to those changes linked to cosmetic surgery effects. The argument that we are somehow imposing our own cultural values on others holds no water – it's what we do all the time, from banning nudity in Scandinavia to defending political speech in Vietnam. We are perfectly within our rights to take a precautionary approach on something as complex and serious as young women's body image and the dangers of cosmetic surgery."
Bullying & harassment
████: "He clearly has great intuition about the type of research that would be helpful for the team, such as partnering with organizations in Nashville to observe teens at school. Unfortunately that wasn't possible due to COVID, but I'm excited about what he'll bring to the team in the future." ████: "I think there's an opportunity for ████ to help redefine how we tackle bullying. We've only scratched the surface when it comes to stopping bullying that happens between teens who know each other. With more research similar to the Nashville research above, I think we can get to the heart of how cyber bullying happens on IG for teens and how we can stop it."
"we also only have age for 55ish percent of people"
Suicide & self-injuryContent Algorithm
████: "In terms of SSI risk if we were to do this, we do have a non-rec SSI filter in place on Explore today targeting depiction. It's an old classifier with low precision and low filter volume so unlikely to materially change ecosystem but may result in some SSI admission content appearing if we removed it" ████: "The more I think about this, the more I feel like the right approach is to just not filter SSI admission for people with the setting off. I'm not going to fight that battle but a pure version of the explanation is the only one that really lands well to me." Karina Newton: "i am really not ok with that" ████: "I agree that the option of setting the bar higher than 'likely violating' is the worst option" Karina Newton: "and this is my problem with describing this as about borderline content" Karina Newton: "i think the holocaust denial example is an academic example that applies to very little content" ████: "I feel like you're just making the case to not provide this control then. Which is an argument that also resonates with me. I'm just worried that we are rationalizing this strange middle ground that will be too hard to defend." Karina Newton: "my issue is this: people who are suffering from depression and self-harm go down IG rabbit holes, and explore functionality compounds this issue. this is why adam published a national op-ed in the uk to say we won't recommend ssi content anymore. this isn't an academic example. and it's not responsible to give young people a way to opt out of this." ████: "I'm also totally fine not providing this setting for people under 18 if that helps. Issues could be that we don't have age for many and could create incentives to lie about age." Karina Newton: "we also only have age for 55ish percent of people" ████: "I totally agree with you. Do you think people who are struggling are so likely to want to go down this rabbit hole that they will see out the setting and turn it off?" Karina Newton: "yes, sadly"
Addiction & problematic use
"Teens' decisions and behavior are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward...While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence in these." "Teens are hungry to learn and therefore seek new experiences and exposure and the teenage brain happens to be pretty easy to stimulate. Novelty seeking further manifests itself in three behaviors that especially lend themselves to social media - exploration, discovery and experiences." "We know IG has traditionally been quite strong on the entertainment front, but we are beginning to get signal the relevance of content on IG may be waning among teens. Why is that? Well for a novelty seeking mind - slow or repetitive content is a buzzkill. More frequently we are hearing that content has become redundant in Stories and other surfaces - especially in comparison to hyper discovery apps like Tik Tok and Youtube." "When it comes to discovery → finding something new or novel, much like our big bro FB, IG has a pretty good hold on the serendipitous aspect of discovery through our Explore surface, recommendations and social graph. And everytime one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit." "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects. Humor and fun are highly valued. But, this does not mean that other types of content don't engage teens. Humor is just one emotional note - and teens are much more complex beings as they explore who they want to be. This explains teens intense occupation with things such as music and competition." "Further, teen brains' are especially 'plastic' or keen to learn presenting a unique opportunity that coupled with curiosity can sends teens down some interesting rabbit holes - absorbing as much as they can about a particular topic." "Teen's insatiable appetite for novelty puts them on a persistent quest to discover new means of stimulation. Think: What would it be like if there was a discovery feature on every IG surface? How can your team give teens somewhere new to go or something new to find from the product you work on?" "Even when teens don't have a particularly negative experience on IG, they can still feel bad based on how they self evaluate compared to what to they see. When adolescents identify a self they aspire to be, and this mismatches with their actual selves studies associate this with poor grades, low self esteem and symptoms of depression. A related problem we have identified internally as social comparison." "Research has shown that social comparison on Fb and IG is highest among teens and young adults." "Teens experience heightened emotions and impact making them more self-important, vulnerable and sensitive." "Lastly a huge driver for teen behavior is the prospect of reward. This is what makes them predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior like drugs, stunts and pranks." "Teen brains are much more sensitive to dopamine, one of the reasons that the risk of drug addiction is higher for adolescents and keeps them scrolling and scrolling. And due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to -- our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app. Teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on IG" "And sadly, a short term reward and inexperience makes teens prone to risky behavior and there are plenty that present themselves online and on Instagram. This could be engaging with predators, consuming dark content, sharing nude photos or copycat self-harm." "Approval and acceptance are huge rewards for teens and interactions are the currency on IG. DMs, notifications, comments, follows, likes, etc. encourage teens to continue engaging and keep coming back to the app." "We do well to think hard about how we can make IG an app tailored to the teenage mindset."
Body image & eating disordersFilters
"A. Meeting Goal Decide on whether to continue, modify, or lift the ban on Cosmetic Surgery AR Effects that we instituted in October 2019 in response to expert and press concerns about potential negative wellbeing impacts (especially on minors). Cosmetic Surgery Effects (as referenced in this doc) are AR / camera effects that change people's facial structure in a way that must be achieved by plastic surgery (such as enlarging eyes or lips, changing the position of eyes or changing the shape of nose or chin) and cannot be achieved by ordinary makeup techniques, unless the result is an exaggerated or humorous transformation (e.g., rapid aging, babyface, character transformation). Continuing to ban Cosmetic Surgery AR Effects negatively impacts creator voice & innovation, and may impact long-term growth (although we lack definitive data)." "[E]xperts from around the world -- APAC included -- generally agree that these effects are cause for concern for mental health and wellbeing, especially amongst vulnerable populations (females, youth, those with a history of mental health concerns, etc.) Additionally, academic research on related topics (e.g., wellbeing impacts of seeing 'ideal' images in media) gives us cause for concern." "C. Key Considerations Competitiveness / Growth: We do see adoption from both users and creators, though we don't have conclusive product impact given the ban was not tested. We face a competitive landscape of sharing effects, and it is likely that we will see a negative growth impact, simply because any restriction is likely to reduce engagement if people go elsewhere. Long-term, limiting our platform could handicap us as we look to bootstrap our network of Creators to build for our future devices."
PLAINTIFFS’ CHARACTERIZATION
Hate speechContent Algorithm
Body image & eating disordersFilters
"Hey there, thanks for getting back to us on this. I respect your call on this and I'll support it, but want to just say for the record that I don't think it's the right call given the risks. As a parent of two teenage girls - one of whom has been hospitalized twice in part for body dysmorphia - I can tell you the pressure on them and their peers coming through social media is intense with respect to body image. I recognize that my family situation makes me somewhat biased but it also gives me first hand knowledge that most of the people looking at this issue don't have. There won't be hard data to prove causal harm for many years, if ever, but I was hoping we could maintain a moderately protective stance here given the risk to minors. I know these are difficult tradeoffs. I don't minimize the concerns about restricting voice and the internationalization angle. I just hope that years from now we will look back and feel good about the decision we made here. I wanted to take a moment to express my disagreement even as we move to implement this decision. Thanks for listening."
Addiction & problematic use
████: "I added some more wording to directly link it to 'problematic use,' but I think most product teams dont understand that this is a euphemism for screen addiction or similar issues." Margaret Stewart: "We should avoid the term 'addiction'. Problematic use is the term the company uses so we should probably work on educating them on that versus sing the other terms which have legal risk ad also are not accurate (ie 'addiction' is a specific medical term that is misapplied in the gen pop context)." Jennifer Guadagno: "Agreed to avoid using 'addiction' and that 'problematic use' is the term we've been using internally and started to externally... We define problematic use as experiencing both of the following issues 'very often' or 'all of the time': - Lack of control or feelings of guilt over FB use - Negative impact in at least one of the following areas: productivity, sleep, parenting, or relationships" ████: "Did you consider having a bullet explicitly about 'screen addiction'/'time well spent'? I imagine it's a touchy subject internally and hard to disentangle from growth metrics, but it's such a core critique of our platform." Margaret Stewart: "The term we use officially is problematic use, but it is a very touchy subject."
"Research Objectives... Discover 'Age Up' and IG onboarding opportunities across the adolescent development process." "We will start our work in the US and expand to other high priority markets, e.g. India, Brazil and Japan and capture insights from age segments representative of each developmental stage of early adolescence (ages 10-12), adolescence (ages 13-17) and emerging adulthood (18-22)."
Direct Messaging
"Starting new teens in a default restricted reachability setting significantly reduce the volume of overall unwanted interactions in DMs" "Recommendations: Don't change the current default interactions model: doing this would cause people to miss out on too many valuable interactions."
Child sexual exploitationContent Algorithm
"As part of the Discoverability work in the Child Safety space, we created an Instagram test user to simulate the seeking behavior of a bad actor." "In less than 24 hours, we followed 70 accounts, which resulted in: • Our Feed, Explore and Recommended Accounts sections being filled almost exclusively with Minor Sexualization content/accounts • Receiving over 20 follow requests from such accounts (including ones we did not follow) • CEI being recommended as the top result in the Explore section (it has been actioned and reported to NCMEC)"
Addiction & problematic use
"Hello everyone, Thanks so much for your attention to the Teen Fundamentals research I shared yesterday. This first phase of research was a foundational step towards getting our footing on what we know about this user group both in and out of the context of Instagram. As we await our teen age models to improve in accuracy, it is even more critical that we continue to pursue understanding teens, their relationship with the world, and our app through this multi-phased research approach." "Summary of discussion: 1. Discovery is a major lever for satisfying teens desire to entertain themselves and learn. We do well to consider how we can improve the discovery experiences on IG (as opposed to adding discovery features) since what we do for teens will likely benefit the whole ecosystem. 2. There is a balance we need to strike between driving engagement and being mindful of teen's well-being. This includes unpacking what 'reward' means to teens and considering how we could build a responsible reward system. How do we help people to progress towards something meaningful? We do not want to drive usage that is problematic to teens. 3. There is an opportunity to incorporate this framework (novelty, emotion, reward) into measurement in order to evaluate what parts of the app need work to enhance teens perception of IG. Adam cited Reels as an example - currently they are measuring value and how entertaining it is but, perhaps we should also measure how novel/new people perceive it." "Next steps: 1. I am working on a research study now in partnership with Eva Caiden from the IG Ambassadors program to understand teen trends. This will lead to a strategy for detecting and anticipating different types of trends. Teens are tastemakers and what we learn from this work can help us to take a proactive approach to evolving the app before competitive threats appear. 2. I am also currently developing a survey that is designed to measure usage and evaluate how different IG surfaces and features are meeting teens needs and expectations. I will also capture their perceptions of how parts of IG measure up in terms of sentiment on the dimensions of novelty, emotion and reward to assess the experience IG is delivering them. This should point us to the areas of the app we need to prioritize. I will also explore working with the Brand Marketing team to see if we can also capture these measurements at an app level within existing efforts such as the Brand Tracker Survey. 3. In terms of constructing a reward system that will engage teens, we will conduct more research to better understand what is truly 'rewarding' for teens and how rewards could contribute to healthy exploration on our platform. a. We have already started breaking ground on understanding how teens feel about the amount of time they spend on Instagram thanks to Kenzie Snyder's investment in our Household Ecosystem understanding. b. There are new solutions being explored to see what could be most beneficial to mitigate problematic usage. I will continue to work with these teams as thought partners and collaborators on this line of research."
Sources include internal documents, public filings and press reports. “Alleged by plaintiffs” denotes the plaintiffs’ characterization, not Meta’s own words. Source labels identify provenance, not a finding of fact.
Meta & Children's Online Safety