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Posted by mdhb 9/8/2025

Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say(www.washingtonpost.com)
509 points | 347 commentspage 4
RianAtheer 9/8/2025|
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 9/8/2025|
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 9/8/2025||
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.

utyop22 9/8/2025||
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intended 9/9/2025||
Isn’t this simply moving your goal posts?

You are also creating a contorted argument to hold onto your blame, making a bonfire out of your credibility. Which is possibly why you are using a new account?

utyop22 9/9/2025||
1) nope 2) new acccount?
haileyLlyod3 9/9/2025||
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alchemical_piss 9/8/2025||
Zuckerberg is one of the most evil men in America.
s5300 9/8/2025||
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ath3nd 9/8/2025||
This is the company that:

- Enabled genocide in Myanmar https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

- Literally pirated books to train their trash AI LLM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

- Violated human rights for Palestinians (even in 2021: https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-pale...)

- Interfered in British politics with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, one of the costliest and stupidest mistakes in UK's history (full of stupid and costly mistakes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

- The CEO of the company is famous for ass-kissing even dumber people than himself e.g: Trump https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

What else do you expect from the trashiest company in the world. Of course they don't care for child safety.

halico_chops 9/8/2025||
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micromacrofoot 9/8/2025||
"Meta suppressed research on child safety" again ... why is anyone still using this company for anything ever?
ITB 9/8/2025|
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
realz 9/8/2025||
Have you considered that maybe the outrage is about what the research results contain?
ITB 9/8/2025||
I’m not saying social media is good for children.

I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.

jermberj 9/8/2025|||
I don't want to beat a dead horse, since sibling commenters have covered this, but I'd implore you to imagine the spectrum of reactions which Meta _could_ have had when discovering their research indicated they were having a negative impact on people.

Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?

Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?

The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.

freejazz 9/8/2025|||
Is the issue that meta didn't "release" the research or that they didn't do anything about the findings and told workers to ignore it?
tuckerman 9/8/2025|||
I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.

It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674

Eddy_Viscosity2 9/8/2025|||
> You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks

Who doesn't like these?

nova22033 9/8/2025|||
We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."
add-sub-mul-div 9/8/2025|||
You're so close to getting it. Maybe there's one more option...
barbazoo 9/8/2025||
Who is "you" here?