Whistleblowers Claim Meta Suppressed Research on Kids’ Safety in VR

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A group of current and old meta-employees accuses society of having removed its own research on children’s safety in virtual reality. According to two current meta-employees and two former, Meta lawyers depress, publish and veto in internal young people in virtual reality in order to minimize the risk of poor press, legal actions and government regulations.

To support the accusations, the group presented a mine of internal documents to the members of a Senate judicial committee, before the hearings on the question that will be held on Tuesday. Obtained for the first time by the Washington Post, documents include thousands of pages of internal messages, presentations and memos which, according to the group, indicate a strategy of several years, led by the Meta legal team, to shape the research on “sensitive subjects”.

Meta denies the accusations. In a statement to the Washington Post, the company of the company Dani Lever has classified the accusations as a “few examples … sewn to adapt a predetermined and false story; In reality since the beginning of 2022, Meta approved nearly 180 studies related to reality laboratories on social problems, including young people and well-being. ”

Internally, it seems that Meta has long been aware of questions related to children’s safety and virtual reality. An internal Babillard article of 2017 included in the Trove is entitled “We have a child problem and it is probably time to talk about it.” In this document, an anonymous anonymous meta-employee: “These children are very obviously under our age limit of 13 years …” and estimates that 80 to 90% of users were minors in certain virtual reality spaces.

After disclosed meta-studies led to Congress hearings in 2021, the company strongly reiterated the importance of transparency, with the drafting of the CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “if we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established a state-of-the-art norm of transparency and relationships on what we do?”

But according to the denunciators, behind the scenes, Meta’s legal team began to select, edit and even oppose the veto to research on young people to “establish a plausible denial”, detailing potential strategies to “mitigate the risk” of conducting sensitive research. In a presentation of slides in November 2021, Meta lawyers suggested that researchers could “conduct research highly sensitive to the avocado-client privilege”, and have all the very sensitive studies examined by lawyers and shared only on a “namely” basis.

Another slide strategy suggests that researchers “are aware” of how studies are supervised, to avoid using terms such as “illegal” or “non -compliant” and avoid saying anything violates a specific law, in favor of leaving legal conclusions to lawyers.

An example of Meta’s policy in practice is given in documents and involves conversations between meta researchers and a German woman. The nameless mother reported that she had not allowed her sons to interact with foreigners in Meta’s virtual reality, but her teenage son interrupted to say that adults had sexually proposed her brother, who was under 10 years of age.

According to one of the researchers and Jason Sattizahn, then one of Meta’s specialists in the study of children and technology, the superiors in Meta ordered that the recording of the adolescent’s comments is deleted and that no mention of it is made in the report of the company. Sattizahn says he was finally dismissed from Meta after disputes with managers concerning research restrictions.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to know exactly how many children actively use Meta VR platforms. For the anecdote, I spent enough time in virtual reality to believe that there is a plot People under the age of 13 in almost all virtual reality spaces, including (and especially) the “horizon worlds” of Meta de Meta. I cannot say with certainty that people behind the avatars are children, but it certainly seems to me a lot of children, a conclusion suggested by documents in the trow. A report indicates that only 41% of users gave the same date of birth that they had used previously when asked. “These results show that many users may not want to provide us with their real DOB,” explains the analysis.

Maintaining this “gray zone” of not really knowing (or recognizing publicly) the age of service users can be in the best interest of Meta. According to a document included in The Trove, one of the Meta lawyers wrote: “In general, the context is that we must avoid collecting research data which indicate that there are U13s present in relictivity or in VR applications (or U18 currently in the context of the horizon) due to regulatory concerns.”

The combination of documents and the meta response indicates a company that works on a thin line – promising promising transparency and security, while managing its research process in private to limit the return of flame in the form of responsibility and attention of regulators. Whether META removes harmful information or exerts understandable legal prudence is an open question, but I hope that these Congress hearings (as disorderly as they are likely to be) bring us closer to the real objective of protecting children in immersive spaces.