According to a report from the Washington Post, two current and two former META employees have been released to Congress, alleging that META may have inhibited research on child safety.
According to them, META changed its policy around research on sensitive subjects (e.g. politics, children, gender, race and harassment). In an internal document leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Meta ‘ s own research found how Instagram had harmed the mental health of adolescents. These revelations were made public in 2021 and have been discussed in Congress for many years on child safety on the Internet, an issue that continues to be a topical topic for global government today.
It was reported that, as part of these policy changes, META proposed two ways in which researchers could limit the risk of conducting sensitive research. One suggestion was to gradually include lawyers in their research and to protect their communication from “vulnerable groups”, such as lawyers and clients. Researchers can also make their findings more visible and avoid terms such as “non-compliance” or “illegal”.
Jason Sattizahn, a former META researcher specializing in VR, told the Washington Post that his boss had made him delete a recording of an interview in which a teenager claimed that his 10-year-old brother had made a sexual exploration on the VR platform Horizon Worlds in Meta.
The spokesperson for META told TechCrunch: “Global privacy regulations make it clear that if information is collected on minors under 13 years of age without the consent of a verifiable parent or guardian, it must be deleted.”
However, the whistleblowers claimed that their documents submitted to Congress showed a model that discouraged employees from discussing and studying their concerns about how to use the Meta SocialVR application for children under 13.
META told TechCrunch: “These examples have been sewn together to fit predefined and false accounts. Indeed, since the beginning of 2022, META has approved nearly 180 social problems related to reality laboratories, including youth safety and well-being.”
In a lawsuit filed in February, Kelly Stonelake, a former employee of META for 15 years, raised similar concerns about the four whistle-blowers. She told TechCrunch earlier in the year that she had led the “listed” strategy, bringing Horizon Worlds to youth, international markets and mobile users, but she felt that the application did not have sufficient means to protect users under the age of 13; she also marked the application for persistent problems with racism.
The suit stated: “The leadership is aware that, in one test, it took an average of 34 seconds to enter the platform, and then to use the term racial discrimination against the users of the black image, including “N-word” and “monkey”.
Stonelake filed separate complaints against META for alleged sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
Despite the charges centre ‘ s VR products on Meta, the company also faced criticism of how other products (e.g. AI chat robots) affected minors. Reuters reported last month that META’s AI rules had previously allowed chat robots to have “romantic or sensitive” conversations with children.
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