As Meta was feeling public pressure over teen mental health, and facing an impending onslaught of kids safety trials, the company considered a campaign to discredit a key critic: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
Newly filed court documents show that in March 2023, Meta discussed a “Whisper strategy” to “turn academics against Haidt,” a thought leader who blamed social media for rising adolescent depression and anxiety. Haidt hadn’t yet published his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, but he testified about his conclusions before Congress in 2022, and in February 2023, he began posting more of his theories and research to Substack. Meta, knowing that a mountain of legal cases brought were set to go to trial within a few years, seemed particularly sensitive to Haidt’s potential to sway the cultural narrative.
In multiple meetings, Meta employees appear to have discussed ways to undermine Haidt, according to a recent filing in federal litigation against the company over its product safety claims for teens. The notes appear in a document labeled, “Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes,” with bulleted items under various dates. The document is riddled with typos and shorthand, suggesting it might contain initial ideas rather than fully formed plans. It’s unclear if Meta acted on the ideas in the meeting notes, and the company did not immediately provide a comment to The Verge on the filing. But the document reveals how Meta viewed the impact of academic influence on the public conversation about Meta’s effect on kids.
Under the heading “Tuesday, March 7, 2023,” the team seemed to consider how to respond to a Substack post in which Haidt reviews research, about a month after he first launched the newsletter. One bullet says, “turn other academics against Haidt — lot of strong methodologists to say things more forcefully.” They already had upcoming legal cases in mind. One bullet simply names Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor who has since testified in kids online safety cases and has collaborated with Haidt. “Long term and short term game. – Multi district litigation is next 2 yrs and his arguments will be featured there,” the document says.
The team considered “Strategic paths” and wrote, “Media and academic elite facing strategy, have that percolate into the media.” Under what appears to be one team member’s name, one bullet says, “undermining H does nto go far enough, are yu still left with WHAT THEN?!”
“[H]ow do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt”
Under a March 8th subheading, apparently referencing Meta’s then-VP of research Curtiss Cobb, the team wrote, “Curtiss’ goal for this work: how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt.” Directly underneath, it said, “Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them.” The group imagined this would be a “Below-the-line campaign” and said one idea was to eventually “Get Gellman to write a take-down piece.” It’s unclear whom the team meant to refer to, but one possibility is Andrew Gelman, a statistics and political science professor at Columbia University who had previously written critically of Haidt’s work on his blog.
In a statement to The Verge, Haidt says he’s “not surprised” to learn that Meta was “strategizing about how to discredit me,” adding that, “When companies can’t dispute the evidence, they go after the messenger.” He says that the “more damning” takeaways from the new filings include documents discussing internal well-being research projects being delayed or blocked by Meta’s legal team and roadblocks to that kind of work. “But the most damning revelation is the lengths that Meta was willing to go to manipulate the scientific process and the scientific community,” Haidt says. “If social manipulation was the heart of their strategy for responding to my writing, that is strong evidence that they had no way to rebut my research.” Gelman and Twenge did not immediately respond or provide comment.
“When companies can’t dispute the evidence, they go after the messenger”
Many academics have vocally disagreed with Haidt’s conclusion that social media can be directly linked to declines in teens’ mental health. Haidt’s former colleague Peter Gray, a psychology research professor at Boston College, recently published a book criticizing Haidt’s theory as promoting a moral panic and offered an alternative theory that pins adolescent mental health issues to the rise of a stringent education curriculum under Common Core. Other prominent researchers also have critiqued the theory, and several large studies and meta analyses have found little or no direct effect of social media use on teen mental health at the population level.
Still, Haidt’s theory has gained credence with many parents, teachers, and teens who believe it reflects their experience with social media. Haidt also has many of his own supporters in the academic community. And based on how employees discussed him internally, even Meta understood the power in that.