PARIS, FRANCE – OCTOBER 29: In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed on the screen of an iPhone in front of a Meta logo on October 29, 2021 in Paris, France. On October 28, during the Facebook Connect virtual conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change of Facebook, believing that the term Facebook was too closely linked to that of the platform of the same name, launched in 2004. It is now official, the Facebook company changes its name and becomes Meta. (Photo illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images)
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While long-time New York Times editor Max Frankel “despised the Russians and sided passionately with their victims,” he wondered in his 1999 memoirs why U.S.-based red baters were so eager to credit “the testimony of former communists who now gained fame and fortune by confessing that they had trafficked in American secrets and Soviet lies.” Why indeed.
Frankel’s orthogonal look at communism’s loudest critics comes to mind after another Washington Post effort to portray Meta as indifferent to the safety of children using its social media. The Post’s latest investigative report was inspired by “a trove of documents from inside Meta that was recently disclosed to Congress by two current and two former employees who allege that Meta suppressed research that might have illuminated potential safety risks to children and teens on the company’s virtual apps.”
The tone of the report raises a question parallel to the one asked by Frankel in the 1950s: if Meta is so ill-intentioned, why is the Post so eager to credit the testimony of two current and two former Meta employees? Considering the two still in Meta’s employ, if we ignore the possibility that the disclosures are an attempt to soften an eventual post-Meta landing, it’s less easy to ignore the nature of their actions while still receiving paychecks from the same corporation they’re trying to besmirch.
From there, it’s worth pointing out that while the Post is basing its allegations (denied by Meta) on the disclosures of four individuals, Meta can presently claim roughly 75, 945 employees. Contemplate the previous number while considering the revelations of two existing and two former employees. That there would be four, and likely many more employees unhappy with how the company operates is no insight. In basketball and football it’s nearly impossible for the best coaches to keep 15 and 53 players happy and committed to the bigger cause, but investigators at the Post expect Meta’s C-suite to keep 75,000+ employees happy?
Furthermore, it’s difficult to credit the Post with any truly material discoveries. It’s once again suggested that Meta “suppressed research that might have illuminated potential safety risks to children and teens,” except for the inconvenient truth that Meta has long gone out of its way to provide parents with all manner of ways to limit child and teen access to its various social media offerings, along with time spent on same. That Meta makes such an effort isn’t evidence of a corporation in denial, but instead one that recognizes the risks involved to younger users, and that is expending enormous resources to help parents mitigate those same risks.
At one point it’s said that Meta executives were aware that young people were migrating online to where they shouldn’t, but to implicate Meta there is the equivalent of criticizing movie theaters, liquor companies, and carmakers for young people occasionally seeing, drinking, and driving what they shouldn’t. Naturally young people are going to break a few rules, but that’s hardly something Meta can or should be expected to control from Menlo Park.
It yet again brings Frankel to mind, and his further mystification that “loyalty oaths” extracted from federal employees would somehow cause the spies in the government’s employ to cease their nefarious activities. It wasn’t a serious view then, and it’s not serious now for investigative journalists to expect all users of Meta’s suite of products to abide any and all usage rules put in place. All Meta can do is help parents protect their children, which is what it’s already doing.