‘SELF HARM’ ALARM

Suit: Meta hid risk

Meta drastically downplayed the degree to which teens were being shown alarming pictures and videos on Instagram that depicted self-harm — even as the tech giant’s own research showed the problem was far more prevalent than publicly known, according to allegations in newly revealed court papers.

The latest allegations surfaced late last week in an unredacted version of a bombshell lawsuit filed in October by 33 states, including New York — and they cite Meta’s claim in 2021 that “less than 0.05% of views were of content that violated our standards against Suicide & Self-Injury.”

Meta — whose billionaire chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faces a possible grilling on Capitol Hill early next year over Instagram and child safety — made the bold statistical claim in its “Community Standards Enforcement Report” (CSER) for the third quarter of 2021.

However, a “contemporaneous” internal Meta survey that same year found that “6.7% of surveyed Instagram users had seen selfharm content within the last seven days,” according to the suit.

The number purportedly jumped to 8.4% for users age 13 to 15.

“In other words, while a reader of the CSER Reports could reasonably understand that self-harm content on Instagram is rarely encountered by users — far less than 1% of the time — in reality Meta knew from its user experience surveys that self-harm content is commonly encountered on Instagram,” the lawsuit claimed.

Likened to tobacco

In the lawsuit, the states also describe internal dissent among Meta insiders regarding company research on potential harms.

In one case, a Meta employee reportedly likened attempts to downplay research on social harms to that of the tobacco industry.

“In September 2021, other Meta employees expressed criticism and concern towards the company for emphasizing that research into social media’s impact is inconclusive, when in fact Meta had conducted research on this issue with more definitive findings,” the suit says.

“An employee stated that Meta’s portrayal of the research as inconclusive would be akin to representations of tobacco companies, which similarly relied on uncertainty in scientific studies to deny that cigarettes caused cancer,” it adds.

Meta says it has released more than 30 tools meant to help teens and their parents navigate social-media use.