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A group of current and former Meta employees are accusing the company of suppressing its own research on child safety in virtual reality. According to two current and two former Meta employees, Meta’s lawyers are screening, editing, and vetoing internal studies about youth safety in virtual reality in order to minimize the risk of bad press, legal actions, and government regulation.
To back up the accusations, the group has presented a trove of internal documents to members of a Senate Judiciary Committee, ahead of hearings on the issue to be held on Tuesday. First obtained by The Washington Post, the documents include thousands of pages of internal messages, presentations, and memos that the group says detail a years-long strategy, led by Meta’s legal team, to shape research on “sensitive topics.”
Meta denies the accusations. In a statement to The Washington Post, company spokesperson Dani Lever categorized the accusations as a “few examples…stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative; in reality since the start of 2022, Meta has approved nearly 180 Reality Labs-related studies on social issues, including youth safety and well-being.”
Internally, it appears Meta has long been aware of questions related to child safety and virtual reality. An internal message board post from 2017 included in the trove is titled, “We have a child problem and it’s probably time to talk about it.” In it, an unnamed Meta employee writes, “These children are very obviously under our 13-year-old age limit…” and goes on to estimate that 80 to 90 percent of users were underage in some virtual reality spaces.
After leaked Meta studies led to congressional hearings in 2021, the company strongly reiterated the importance of transparency, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing, “If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we’re doing?”
But according to the whistleblowers, behind-the-scenes, Meta’s legal team began screening, editing, and even vetoing research about youth safety to “establish plausible deniability,” detailing potential strategies to “mitigate the risk” of conducting sensitive research. In a November 2021 slide presentation, Meta’s lawyers suggested researchers could “conduct highly-sensitive research under attorney-client privilege,” and have all highly sensitive studies reviewed by lawyers and shared only on a “need-to-know” basis.
Another strategy from the slide suggests researchers “be mindful” of how studies are framed, avoid using terms like “illegal” or “not compliant,” and avoid saying anything violates a specific law, in favor of leaving legal conclusions to attorneys.
What do you think so far?
An example of Meta’s policy in practice is given in the documents, and involves conversations between Meta researchers and a German woman. The unnamed mother reported that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers in Meta’s virtual reality, but her teenage son interrupted to say that adults had sexually propositioned his brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
According to one of the researchers and Jason Sattizahn, then one of Meta’s specialists in studying children and technology, higher-ups at Meta ordered that the recording of the teen’s comments should be deleted, and that no mention of it should be made in the company’s report. Sattizahn says he was eventually fired from Meta after disputes with managers about restrictions on research.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know exactly how many kids are actively using Meta’s VR platforms. Anecdotally, I’ve spent enough time in virtual reality to believe there are a lot of people under 13 in just about every virtual reality space, including (and especially) Meta’s own “Horizon Worlds.” I can’t say for certain that the people behind the avatars are children, but it sure seems like a lot of kids to me, a conclusion suggested by documents in the trove. One report indicates that only 41 percent of users gave the same date of birth they’d used previously when asked. “These findings show that many users may be unwilling to provide us with their true DOB,” the analysis says.
Maintaining that “gray area” of not really knowing (or publicly acknowledging) the ages of users of the service may be in Meta’s best interest. According to a document included in the trove, one of Meta’s lawyers wrote, “In general, the context is that we should avoid collection of research data that indicates that there are U13s present in VR or in VR apps (or U18 currently in the context of Horizon) due to regulatory concerns.”
The combination of the documents and Meta’s response indicate a company walking a thin line—publicly promising transparency and safety, while privately managing its research process to limit blowback in the form of liability and regulators’ attention. Whether Meta is suppressing damaging information or exercising understandable legal caution is an open question, but hopefully these congressional hearings (as messy as they’re likely to be) get us closer to the real goal of protecting children in immersive spaces.
