Reported by The Guardian
Court documents reveal staff considered ways to ‘get academic community to disavow’ influential US author
Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown , according to court documents.
Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation , a book that helped tip the debate about online safety towards more stringent measures such as the under-16 ban in Australia.
More from the original report
Minutes of internal meetings contained in a recent legal filing in the US showed that staff discussed how to “get the academic community to disavow Haidt”.
They appear in a document titled “Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes”, which refers to discussions of how Meta could “turn other academics against Haidt” and to a “whisper strategy” aimed at achieving that goal. It also mentions “debunking” his work.
Minutes from a meeting on 8 March 2023 mention “Curtiss”, an apparent reference to Meta’s then vice-president of research, Curtiss Cobb. It states: “Curtiss’s goal for this work: how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt. Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them … so the media finds him not credible.”
It then adds: “Not thinking about this as a loud strategy. A below-the-line campaign.”
It suggests getting someone called “Gellman” to write “a takedown piece”. The “Gellman” figure is not identified in the document but Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University who has been critical of Haidt’s work, wrote in a blogpost this week that he was “never hired by Facebook to do a hit job on Jonathan Haidt”.
Gelman said he had received money from Mark Zuckerberg’s company in the past on a “no-strings” basis but had never been asked by Meta to look at social media’s impact on teenagers’ health.
Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation argued that widespread use of smartphones has caused a mental health crisis for young people.
The academic has become a persuasive advocate for strict regulation of digital media and devices,…