By Ashwin Verghese, Fairplay Communications Director
Meta’s own employees are coming forward to expose the company for covering up the harms kids experience on its platforms. And our Fairplay community has been right at the forefront, helping to take Meta on.
Four courageous whistleblowers have shared documents with Congress revealing that Meta suppressed research about child safety on its virtual reality platforms. According to The Washington Post, the current and former employees say Meta “deployed its legal team to screen, edit and sometimes veto internal research about youth safety in VR … seeking to ‘establish plausible deniability’ about negative effects of the company’s products.”
The Post reported that the whistleblowers submitted their materials to Congress in May. That was just shortly after we at Fairplay filed a complaint at the Federal Trade Commission over Meta knowingly allowing underage kids to use its “Horizon Worlds” gaming platform in violation of children’s privacy law. Kelly Stonelake, another former Meta employee, supported our complaint with a sworn statement.
Since our filing, Meta has continued to get called out from the inside. On Tuesday, two of the new whistleblowers — Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage — appeared before Congress at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. As they testified, I was fortunate enough to sit right behind them alongside my Fairplay colleague Haley Hinkle and the inspiring ParentsSOS survivor parents Christine McComas, Mia Minor, Maurine Molak, and Brian Montgomery, all of whom lost children to online harms.
Being on the Hill that day was an incredible experience. Not only did we get to watch from the front row as Sattizahn and Savage exposed Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow executives for deliberately turning a blind eye to kids’ safety, but our survivor parents were also able to speak out against Meta themselves during a press conference hosted by several senators.
The busy day also helped reignite enthusiasm for KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. In one NBC News clip that was aired far and wide, Christine was asked by reporter Julie Tsirkin what she would say to Mark Zuckerberg. In her reply, Chris harkened back to another historic Senate hearing last year, when Zuckerberg was pressured into apologizing to survivor parents in the room.
“Mark Zuckerberg, you stood up, and you spoke to us, and you apologized, and you said you were making all kinds of changes to protect children,” Chris said. “And then we got [KOSA] passed almost unanimously through the Senate. And instead of helping to get that safety for children, you spent millions telling lies. Fearmongering. Different lies depending on which side you were talking to. And that can’t continue. It just can’t.
“He needs to do the right thing,” Chris continued. “Everybody needs to get on board. And the Kids Online Safety Act needs to pass this year.”