In a legal filing released on Friday, Meta halted the internal research, which indicated that the users who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious.
According to the legal brief, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the social media giant was reported to have started the study, dubbed Project Mercury, in late 2019, in an attempt to understand, “explore the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions.”
However, the filing includes unredacted information related to Meta. The new legal brief is associated with high-profile multidistrict litigation involving many plaintiffs, including school districts, parents, and state attorneys general against social media companies, including Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snap, and TikTok.
The plaintiffs assert that these companies knew that their respective platforms had different mental health-related harms on children and young adults, yet they did nothing about it and instead misled educators and authorities, among several allegations.
In a statement, a spokesperson of Meta, Andy Stone, said that “We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture. The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences.”
In a statement, a Google spokesperson reported that “These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and the allegations are simply not true.”
Spokesperson of Google stated that “YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends. We’ve also developed dedicated tools for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control.”
Therefore, Snap and TikTok did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The lawsuit reported that the 2019 Meta research relied on a random sample of consumers who stopped their use of Facebook and Instagram for a month.
The lawsuit alleged that Meta was dismayed that the initial testing of the experiment revealed that individuals who had stopped using Facebook “for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.”
The lawsuit claimed that Meta allegedly did not “sound the alarm,” but rather halted the study. The lawsuit states that “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study. Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.”
An anonymous meta employee said that “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”
In a sequence of posts on social media, Stone disputed the implication of the lawsuit that the internal research was closed by Meta once it allegedly demonstrated a causal connection between its apps and negative mental-health outcomes.
Stone described the 2019 study as fallacious, and this was the reason why the company expressed disappointment. According to the study, Stone explained that it just established that “people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it.”
In a separate post, Stone stated that “This is a confirmation of other public research (“deactivation studies”) out there that demonstrates the same effect. It makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t show anything about the actual effect of using the platform.”
