Meta, Jonathan Haidt, and the Questions Parents Deserve Answered

Meta, Jonathan Haidt, and the Questions Parents Deserve Answered

When concerns arise that a product could be harming kids, I want to know what the company behind it is doing about it. Are they investigating? Are they sharing what they learn? Are they making changes to protect young people?

Recent reporting about Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, leaves me with a different set of questions. Court documents describe internal discussions about turning academics against Jonathan Haidt, who has raised concerns about social media and youth mental health. Parents and professionals are trying to understand what is happening to kids, and we need reliable information to help us make decisions.

What Did Meta Discuss About Jonathan Haidt?

According to The Verge, court documents include notes from March 2023 meetings in which Meta employees discussed a “whisper strategy” aimed at turning academics against Haidt. These discussions happened before The Anxious Generation was published, when he was already speaking publicly about his concerns.

Employees discussed encouraging stronger criticism from academics and influencing media opinion. The notes also referenced anticipated litigation in which Haidt’s arguments could appear. It remains unclear whether Meta carried out those ideas.

I expect researchers to challenge each other’s work. If Haidt’s conclusions have weaknesses, those should be examined openly. I also expect a company whose products are being questioned to explain what its own research shows and how it is responding.

Reading about discussions to turn academics against a critic leaves me wondering where kids fit into those conversations. Were employees asking how to better understand the concerns? How to make the products safer? Or how to make the person raising those concerns less believable?

What About Meta’s Own Research?

The reporting also includes Haidt’s concerns about documents describing internal well-being research being delayed or blocked by Meta’s legal team. Parents and professionals deserve to know what research was affected, why it was held up, and what we might have learned from it.

The available reporting does not establish that every delayed project involved completed findings that Meta concealed. It does raise questions about how freely researchers inside the company could investigate potential harm. I want those questions answered without the company’s reputation becoming more valuable than the information families need.

If research reveals a problem, we need to know about it. If a study has limitations, explain them. If more research is needed, do it. Adults cannot make informed decisions about kids and technology when the information available to us is shaped around protecting a business.

Why I Keep Asking These Questions

I started doing what would become Shape The Sky trainings unofficially in 2012 and formally founded Shape The Sky in 2015. In those early years, I remember feeling like smartphones and social media were doing something to kids. I couldn’t fully explain it, but I wanted to understand it.

Much of my training focused on exposure. Kids were encountering content about depression, suicide, and other mental health concerns through memes and social media posts. Some of it could help them feel understood, while some was misleading or missing context. Where were they going to get accurate information?

I wanted adults to understand what kids were seeing so we could help them make sense of it. I also had questions about what these platforms were doing to friendships, sleep, self-image, and the experience of growing up.

When I read the Meta reporting, I think about parents, counselors, and educators trying to help a child who is struggling. They are deciding what boundaries to set, what questions to ask, and what to believe. They deserve access to research that helps them make those decisions.

What Do We Know About Social Media and Youth Mental Health?

Haidt’s The Anxious Generation brought concerns about a phone-based childhood into a much larger public conversation. Researchers disagree about his conclusions and about how much social media explains changes in youth mental health. Those disagreements should be examined on the evidence, without assuming every critic is influenced by a technology company.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory identifies potential benefits and serious risks associated with social media. It also states that there is not enough evidence to conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. Parents still have to make decisions about phones, apps, and boundaries while researchers work through those questions.

We need to understand what helps kids and what can harm them. We need research that can be questioned, examined, and built upon. And we need companies willing to share uncomfortable findings and make changes when their products create risks.

Kids Are More Than a Profile

When something becomes popular, it makes money. When it makes money, companies compete to keep people interested and coming back. The business benefits when people keep using the product, even when taking a break might be better for them.

A parent may want a teenager to put the phone down and get some sleep. A platform benefits when that same teenager keeps scrolling. We should keep that tension in mind when companies tell us how much they care about young people’s well-being.

We can expect more from those companies while staying involved in the lives of the kids in front of us. Ask what they enjoy online, what wears them out, and what they wish adults understood. Give them room to answer without every conversation becoming a lecture or a threat to take away their phone.

We still have plenty to offer. We can help kids question what they see, recognize when an app is taking more than it gives, and practice putting it down. We can make room for friendships, interests, and experiences that help them feel good about themselves beyond a screen.

A young person’s life is still being written. They can learn from a mistake, develop healthier habits, find something they love, and build relationships that remind them they belong. Our involvement can help them see those possibilities, even when their online world feels overwhelming.

Kids are more than a profile. They have ideas, abilities, humor, hopes, and a future that reaches far beyond what any platform can measure. We can help them discover all of that, one conversation and one experience at a time.

~Ryan