Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say
217 comments
·September 8, 2025dagmx
Taek
From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
jjulius
>From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
wahnfrieden
You need a much bigger and systemic change than a new CEO for that
yndoendo
This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
masklinn
> This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Or Monsanto. Or GM / Ethyl Corp. Or Purdue. Or...
Purdue is a pretty close match I think: they didn't have to be completely bereft of ethics and actively harmful to society, they chose to.
bix6
I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.
pkphilip
Zuck was known to log the passwords from failed login attempts and then secretly use these passwords to log into their emails.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...
Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.
kace91
Remember Facebook’s original use? I guess that’s an answer.
moolcool
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
pfortuny
Being the owner of a business does not exempt you from being a human being. Ethics apply. A person is more valuable than a company.
yoyohello13
History has unequivocally proven that the majority of big business leaders don’t give a shit about ethics. In fact, they will come up with whole new ideologies to justify their behavior (see effective altruism).
latexr
It’s worrying that we have to keep repeating this so often. The amount of people defending abhorrent behaviour with a version of “the CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders” boggles the mind.
watwut
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
yoyohello13
This is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.
lossolo
Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.
slg
Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Retric
No, many companies actually try and avoid harming their customers. Thus new safety features on cars etc.
Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.
sznio
The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
slg
Safe cars sell. What makes you think that car safety is anything but a business strategy? There is of course the story of Volvo's handling of the patent for the 3-point seat belt, but that was over a half century ago and was notably not an American company. Has there been anything like that in recent history?
palmotea
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
triceratops
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires."
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
stanfordkid
It always astounds me how stupid economists are. Like only an economist would use reasoning using terms something like epsilon to infinity to describe something that is a context dependent feedback loop in a closed system. Like these guys are literally idiots that studied real analysis then said maybe we can just apply that to an oil and gas company, without thinking about how it requires people and social consensus etc. to actually carry out these activities and they exist in a finite closed system with feedback.
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
Apocryphon
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
swed420
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
loudmax
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
beambot
Sorry, he said the wrong numbers...
ModernMech
How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
binary132
Why are you displacing blame from meta?
tengbretson
Am I supposed to blame a fox for eating my chickens?
josfredo
It’s the responsible thing to do. As a member of society you have to own your misbehaviors too. You can not have it both ways.
philipallstar
The adults meant to keep children safe aren't the employees of Meta.
ModernMech
Because what are we going to blame them for? Acting in accordance to the way their corporate shareholders and thereby society expect them to? I'm not not interested in that fight anymore. If you want things to change, the idea of a corporation and its role in society has to fundamentally change.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
SoftTalker
It is the modern version of "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
utyop22
Yeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.
delusional
Interestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
anal_reactor
This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.
this_user
> This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides
Have you seen recent US governments?
everdrive
>Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
dzink
There is a mistaken assumption here that government will ever do anything better for tech products.
afavour
The government is at least far more accountable to the people. Certainly, it could be a lot more accountable than it is, it’s very far from ideal. But it’s something.
pfortuny
Exactly. Look at railroads in the USA… For instance.
anal_reactor
Yes, and it aligns with my experience. It takes a while, but it works. My home country created an app where I can have legally valid ID and driving license. When the coronavirus hit most of the infrastructure for the vaccination certificates was already there. The one where I live in now created a website where tax report boils down to a series of easily understandable questions, and most users will just click "next next next send". Train company has an app that allows me to check the timetable very easily.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
sleepybrett
I prefer the classic american approach. Smash them to pieces.
novok
Government divisions ignore ethics & morality all the time if it's politically inconvenient, and what is even worse is since they are the government, they are immune from most criminal and civil prosecution! Using the PRC as a bastion of morality isn't good idea either. (watch as I get pro-PRC troll replies)
Be careful what you wish for!
polytely
Atleast in China they have to option to give CEO's the death penalty if they step out of line. I think silicon valley behaviour would be better if the CEO's had some skin in the game.
ben_w
I would not want the current US president to hold the power to kill CEOs that he thinks have stepped "out of line".
Quite a few of the other presidents, likewise.
itsoktocry
Kills the CEOs, but don't punish actual criminals, very left-coded.
JCM9
Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
christophilus
I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
abeppu
In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
walthamstow
They didn't see "don't use", they said "don't trust", meaning apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
abeppu
I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
JKCalhoun
Yeah but it's kind of too sensible as to be not very useful or actionable.
I mean, of course we don't trust big corporations.
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deberon
Aren’t those all industries that are now highly regulated because they proved themselves to be untrustworthy?
gjsman-1000
Yes. Why do you think Google is requiring identity verification on Android now?
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
skizm
You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.
cm2012
In my experience, big businesses are way better about worker compensation, benefits and treatments compared to small businesses in the same industy.
Verdex
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
noitpmeder
I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.
dijit
Don’t they have communicators?
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
marcosdumay
Star Trek has messages faster than the speed of light. And TNG and later have universal P2P communication with or without a reliable computer time-delaying it.
Honestly, I don't know what the conversation is about either.
noitpmeder
Sorry, my musings were more general, not restricted to Star-Trek/... content. I mean more generally any movie in a setting within the last ~5-10 years~ to any time in the future. The fact that half the main characters / background extras / don't have their heads buried in mobile phones is by itself noticeable to me :)
2OEH8eoCRo0
How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.
SoftTalker
They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.
everdrive
Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.
jedberg
Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
Apocryphon
Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?
RianAtheer
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces. They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
utyop22
Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.
philjohn
I worked on Integrity at Meta for 4 years, including a stint on the child safety team.
Absolutely, I would have been fine with the stock not growing as fast (it would still have grown, Meta has billions of users), as would every single one of the IC's I regularly worked with.
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Rafuino
Please, please, please don't entertain job offers from this company. Don't even talk with them. They don't deserve your talent
avgDev
Social Media is the new tobacco.
foobar_______
I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.
teamonkey
The new leaded gas.
pkphilip
I am not surprised at all. I know no tech titan as creepy as Zuck
Quitschquat
Not surprising if you’ve read the account in “Careless People”. Growth at all costs.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
andsoitis
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
abeppu
How about:
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
gjsman-1000
> validates age
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
mxkopy
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
gjsman-1000
I don’t believe that for a second.
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
yepitwas
[dead]
Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.